november 2018 Modern Painters

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modernpainters NOVEMBER 2018

TOP 10 YOUNG ARTISTS TO WATCH BHARTI KHER: WITH NO FIXED BOUNDARIES

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AT THE WHITNEY: HOW WARHOL DESTABILIZED THE IMAGE BRANCUSI’S LEGACY SHINES ON IN NEW YORK

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VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 11

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LETTER FROM THE EDITORS // NOVEMBER

INSPIRATION FROM EVERYWHERE When we interview artists for Modern Painters, one obvious avenue of questioning is to explore their inspiration. That is, what is it that makes them tick; what makes them pick up a paintbrush; who or what impels them to get out of bed in the morning and create. Very often, the answers go right back to childhood. One example is Paula Rego, 83, whose love affair with fairy tales began when she was a girl in Portugal. These sometimes disturbing narratives told to her by her elderly aunt decades ago have now led to her irst ever French museum show, featuring more than 70 works alongside others by some of her favorite artists. Rego tells Tobias Grey of how she revisited Grimm Brothers books as part of the process. Ian Davenport, 51, is another artist with early memories that influence his work today. He recounts to Mark Piggott that in his bedroom as a child he had a poster of “The Harvest” by Vincent van Gogh and this memory triggered one of his most recent paintings, “The Harvest Study (After Van Gogh).” Will Boone, 36, also harks back to his youth, with art that mixes memories of his skateboarding and punk rock music. He explains to Cody Delistraty that while he hates the term “Americana,” his work combines American images and has new signiicance in the current political climate. Bharti Kher, 49, a London-born, India-based artist, talks to Archana Khare-Ghose about her long-held fascination with the bindi that Indian women wear on their foreheads. Erró, 86, an Iceland-born, French-based artist, tells Aymeric Mantoux about the lure of collage, and especially his early monochrome works, which are now back in fashion. Moving away from the strictly Contemporary and over to New York, we look at the Modern great Andy Warhol through the eyes of Donna De Salvo, the curator of a Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum, while Jérôme Neutres, the author of “Brancusi in New York,” surveys new shows of the master’s sculpture in the Big Apple. As the Tate Modern celebrates Anni Albers, we examine how the artist propelled weaving from a quaint pastime into the vanguard of 20th-century modernism. This issue also continues with our provocative top lists. This time we take on the top 10 young artists to watch in a carefully-considered grouping. It is probably easier to compile a top 100 artists list. Feel free to agree or disagree! Each of them also has their own unique inspiration — from science to Sikhism. Put this together with the likes of skateboarding to bindis already mentioned, and all of human life is here. The resulting art is inspiring, and we hope our articles are similarly so in giving an insight into modern painters, and indeed artists of all kinds.

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GLOBAL. GROUNDBREAKING. NOW.

Forward-Looking News and Analysis *HWIUHHGDLO\EULHƓQJV

WORLD - POLITICS - BUSINESS - TECHNOLOGY - SCIENCE & HEALTH ARTS - ENTERTAINMENT - LIFESTYLE - TRAVEL

102 Detail of a watercolor work by Erro presented in Vienna in 2017, (Gallery Ernst Hilger).

14 A Conversation with Alison Jacques

The gallerist has earned a solid reputation for quality and promoting women artists by Anya Harrison

modernpainters NOVEMBER 2018

TOP 10 YOUNG ARTISTS TO WATCH BHARTI KHER: WITH NO FIXED BOUNDARIES

Young Artists 21 10 To Watch

These are cultural practitioners whom we are particularly excited to be following in the current moment by Anya Harrison

30 Brancusi’s Legacy Shines on

It is in New York that the sculptor’s works can be best experienced this fall, with two new exhibitions: at the MOMA and the Paul Kasmin Gallery by Jérôme Neutres

38 Paula Rego’s Dark Fairy Tales

The artist’s works, shown at the Musée de l’Orangerie, reveal some uncomfortable truths by Tobias Grey

AT THE WHITNEY: HOW WARHOL DESTABILIZED THE IMAGE BRANCUSI’S LEGACY SHINES ON IN NEW YORK

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On the Cover: Andy Warhol (1928–1987), “Mao,” 1972, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and graphite on linen, 4.48 x 3.47 m., The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize and Wilson L. Mead funds.

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48 Transcending

Re-appropriation

The American artist Will Boone talks about the impulses and influences that shape his categorybusting body of work by Cody Delistraty

54 Paris Photo: The Year of the Woman?

The recent edition makes a conscious effort to showcase the work of female photographers by Sarah Moroz

A B OV E: P H OTO BY AY M E R I C M A N TO U X . O N T H E C OV E R : © T H E A N DY WA R H O L F O U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V I S UA L A R T S , I N C . / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) N E W YO R K

CONTENTS

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CONTENTS

N OVE M B E R 2 018

110 F R O M L E F T: P H OTO BY: J O O N E Y W O O D WA R D. B OT H P I C S: P H OTO G R A P H Y: J E F F M C L A N E C O U R T E S Y O F DAV I D KO R DA N S K Y GA L L E R Y, LO S A N G E L E S , C A . © S U C C E S S I O N B R A N C U S I , A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D/A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) , N E W YO R K /A DAG P, PA R I S . C O U R T E S Y E S TAT E O F C O N S TA N T I N B R A N C U S I . .

Portrait of Ian Davenport.

48 Will Boone, “Voyeur,” 2018, acrylic on canvas, over wood panel, 74 x 60 3/4 x 1 1/4 in. (188 x 154.3 x 3.2 cm.).

62 From Couture to the Supermarket

Donna De Salvo, the curator of the Andy Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum, discusses how the artist destabilized the image by Amy Zion

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With No Fixed Boundaries

Bharti Kher’s works seamlessly meld the multiple identities of a modern global citizen by Archana Khare-Ghose

30 82 Feel Free to Touch the Art

Franz West gets a retrospective at the Pompidou Center on Paris, with 200 of his unconventional works on view by Cody Delistraty

92 Architecture with a

Natural Connection

An interview with Kengo Kuma, who is behind the new V&A Dundee in Scotland and the future Albert Kahn museum in France by Devorah Lauter

Constantin Brancusi, “Torse de jeune fille (Torso of a Young Girl),” 1922, polished bronze, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.,/31.8 x 24.1 x 18.4 cm., Edition of 8, cast by Susse Fondeur, Paris in 2017.

102 Erró Sees the World

in Black and White

This autumn, three exhibitions pay tribute to the “Black & White” series and works from this prince of narrative figuration by Aymeric Mantoux

110 Ian Davenport Lines Up His Colorful Vision

The abstract painter’s reputation has only steadily grown in recent years by Mark Piggott

Modern Painters, ISSN 0953-6698, is published monthly by LTB Media (U.K.) Ltd., an affiliate of BlouinArtinfo Corp, 80 Broad Street, Suite 606/607, New York, NY 10004. Vol. XXX, No. 10. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, Send address changes to: Fulco, Inc., Modern Painters, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000.

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CONTRIBUTORS // NOVEMBER

Kimberly Conniff Taber Kim Conniff Taber is a group editor for the Blouin magazines and web sites, recruiting writers in Europe, Asia and the U.S. and commissioning irst-rate criticism and arts reporting. A journalist and editorial consultant, she advises organizations on ways to sharpen their content for maximum impact in the digital era. She was previously the culture editor of the International New York Times; and before that its senior editor of magazines and art special reports. Prior to joining the NYT company in 2003, Kim was a writer with Brill’s Content Magazine in New York and taught journalism at the University of Pennsylvania and the American University of Paris. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and has just completed an executive master’s in digital management at Sciences Po in Paris.

Archana Khare-Ghose Archana Khare-Ghose is a group editor with the Blouin Artinfo magazines and websites, anchoring the editorial teams as well as commissioning and writing stories. She has been an arts journalist and writer for the past 19 years. Beginning with covering the South Asian art scene, she soon graduated to covering and writing about arts and culture at the global level, by reporting from key cultural capitals of the world. Prior to joining Blouin Artinfo Corp, she was the Arts, Culture & Books editor with The Times of India, the largest selling English language daily of the world. In 2012, she was chosen as a cultural leader from Asia by the US Department of State, to visit lesser-known cultural institutions across eight cities of the US, to get insights into the role of culture in bringing about social change.

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Mark Beech Mark Beech has been a journalist for more than 30 years and is the author of four books. He previously was Global Team leader for Bloomberg News’s arts and culture section, Bloomberg Muse. His experience includes spells working for Forbes as an entertainment correspondent; the Sunday Times; ITN; and as editor of Dante magazine. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and holds an MA from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He writes about performing arts from music to theater - and auctions, from visual art to cars and wine. He has also written and lectured extensively, appeared on television more than 100 times and consulted on social media and management for many companies.

Chris Welsch Chris Welsch, a contributing editor for BLOUINARTINFO, is an editor, writer and photographer, based in Paris for the past seven years. A former staff editor at the New York Times, his photos and stories have appeared in the Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Minneapolis Star Tribune (where he worked for 15 years as a travel reporter and photographer). He’s working toward an exhibition of his photographs of Paris.

Louisa Elderton Louisa Elderton is a writer, editor and curator based in London and Berlin, specialising in art and culture. She writes widely on Contemporary art for international publications including Artforum, Art in America and Metropolis M, and is a Project Editor for Phaidon delivering their ‘Vitamin’ books. With a Master’s degree in curating from The Courtauld Institute of Art, she has curated solo exhibition by artists including Wim Wenders, Lawrence Weiner, Francesco Clemente, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Rachel Howard, among others.

Cody Delistraty Based in Paris, Cody Delistraty writes proiles and cultural criticism for the deadtree and digital pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Esquire, among others. He also works on art and editorial projects for Dior, and he was named one of the best young writers of 2017 by British Vogue. He holds a bachelor’s degree from N.Y.U. and a master’s in European history from Oxford. He is currently completing his irst novel.

Anya Harrison Anya Harrison is a writer, curator and consultant based in London who has contributed to Flash Art, The Calvert Journal, GARAGE Magazine, Performa Magazine, Moscow Art Journal and other publications, mostly covering art and ilm. After completing a Master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she worked for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, from where she originally hails. She is co-founder of The New Social, a curatorial, and is part of the curatorial team for the 13th Baltic Triennial.

Tina Xu

Stephen Heyman

Tina Xu is a writer-ilmmaker drawn to stories about the fragmentation and evolution of culture in an interconnected world. She grew up between California and China and is currently based in Beijing and Boston. She is inspired by the ways in which artists serve as prophetic voices in the midst of frenetic change. Formally educated in political theory and international relations, she believes that art can contribute to a more peaceful world by luring viewers toward empathy and contemplation.

Michael Prodger Michael Prodger teaches art history at the University of Buckingham and is an art critic for the New Statesman and Standpoint magazines. He is a former literary editor and judge of the Man Booker Prize. He writes on books and art for a number of publications including the Times, Sunday Times and the Guardian.

Mark Piggott

Constance Chien

London-based author and journalist Mark Piggott has written for the Times, Sunday Times and numerous other newspapers, and is author of four novels, with two more underway. He has a Master of Arts and has lectured in journalism and criticism. His website is at markpiggott.com.

Victoria Gomelsky Victoria Gomelsky is editor in chief of JCK, a 148-year-old jewelry trade magazine based in New York City. She joined the staff of JCK in 2010, after spending several years covering the ine jewelry and watch markets for both trade and consumer publications. Her freelance work has appeared in the New York Times, WSJ Magazine, AFAR, the Hollywood Reporter, and Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally, an anthology published by Seal Press.

Warwick Thompson Warwick Thompson says that he often feels like the word “opera” runs through him like a stick of Brighton rock. He’s a critic for various outlets, including Metro newspaper and Opera magazine. He’s also got a novel about 18th -century London in the pipeline.

Stephen Heyman writes about culture, travel and design for the New York Times and other ine publications. He was formerly a features editor at T: the New York Times Style Magazine. His weekly column charting international culture “by the numbers” ran in the global edition of The Times from 2013 to 2015. He has also written for AD, Dwell, Esquire, Slate, Town & Country, Travel & Leisure, Vogue.com, W and The Wall Street Journal.

Constance Chien is a writer and educator currently based in Beijing. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, contemporary French poetry and cinema, and media theory. She graduated from Wellesley College, and has lived in cities in France, the United States, and China.

Jérôme Neutres Jérôme Neutres, PhD, is an international art critic, curator of some 40 art exhibitions in various countries. He is also currently director of strategy at the RMN-Grand Palais, and president of the Musée du Luxembourg, both in Paris.

Richard Chang Richard Chang is a Southern California-based journalist, arts writer and educator. He has written for ARTnews, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, Coast Magazine, Montage Magazine, Laguna Beach Magazine and a number of newspapers and arts and lifestyle publications. He served as arts reporter and chief visual art critic for the Orange County Register for more than 14 years. He recently served as arts and culture editor at L.A. Weekly. Richard received degrees from Brown University and UC Berkeley, and has taught journalism and writing at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton and Cal Poly Pomona.

Annie Godfrey Larmon Annie Godfrey Larmon is a writer, editor, and curator based in New York. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her writing has also appeared in Bookforum, Frieze, MAY, Spike, Vdrome, and WdW Review. The recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for shortform writing, she is the editor of publications for the inaugural Okayama Art Summit and a former international reviews editor of Artforum. She is the co-author, with Ken Okiishi and Alise Upitis, of “The Very Quick of the Word” (Sternberg Press, 2014), and she has penned features and catalogue essays on the work of numerous artists.

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CONTRIBUTORS // NOVEMBER

Nina Siegal Nina Siegal is an American author and journalist who has been based in Amsterdam for 11 years. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and she also writes for The Economist, Bloomberg News, and various art and culture magazines. For an art market report for Bloomberg in 2004, Nina traveled for the irst time to the Netherlands to cover the TEFAF fair in Maastricht, where she was able to see four Rembrandt portraits at the same time in the Robert Noortman Gallery, and later visited the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam. She became fascinated by Dutch Golden Age painting and in 2006, returned to the Netherlands with a Fulbright grant to write her second novel, “The Anatomy Lesson,” about Rembrandt’s irst large-scale group portrait. She ended up staying in Amsterdam, writing about art, museums, art crime, authenticity and attribution issues, and European cultural life.

Elin McCoy Award-winning journalist Elin McCoy is wine critic for Bloomberg News, where she has written a column since 2001; she’s also the New York columnist at the U.K.’s biggest wine magazine Decanter, and writes frequently for The World of Fine Wine as well as for her blog at www.elinmccoy.com. Her book, “The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste,” garnered international praise. McCoy got her wine start at Food & Wine magazine, and has written several thousand articles for many other publications. She’s currently at work on a surprising true tale of a commune winery set in 19th century Sonoma County.

Matthew Rose The artist, writer and musician Matthew Rose is an American who has lived and worked in Paris for some 25 years. Matthew’s exhibition of rooms layered with his wall-to-wall collage works have taken him across the United States and Europe; and he’s recently published a catalog of his drawings – “evidence.” As a journalist, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Art & Antiques, Art Review and dozens of art publications focusing largely on contemporary art. His twicemonthly columns for The Art Blog range from political art essays to proiles on emerging artists, street and ephemeral art as well as critical takes on some big guns in the art world.

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MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2018 BLOUINARTINFO.COM

Jessica Michault Jessica Michault is the editor of the member- only luxury website GPS Radar and the host of the podcast Fashion Your Seatbelt. She has been voted one of the Business of Fashion 500 Most Influential People in the World of Fashion. Over the past 20 years she has covered the industry for the likes of The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Italian Vogue, Antidote and Industrie. Born and raised in San Francisco, she is now based in Paris where she lives with her husband, three little girls and an ever increasing collection of vintage hair combs.

Tobias Grey Grey is a Paris-based arts writer and critic based in Paris. He writes on art, literature, cinema and current affairs for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, American Vogue and Newsweek. Grey is equally adept at writing proiles of major creative igures as he is at writing criticism and lengthy features.

Devorah Lauter Devorah Lauter is a journalist whose work has appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Times, The International New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Women’s Wear Daily, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, to name a few. Originally from San Francisco, Devorah started her career working for the independent publisher, McSweeney’s, which founded the literary quarterly by the same name, and monthly publication The Believer, as well as the writing workshop 826 Valencia. She recently returned to Paris after living in South Africa, where she taught creative writing.

Sarah Moroz Sarah Moroz is a FrancoAmerican journalist and translator; she has been based in Paris for the past decade. She writes about photography, art, fashion, and other cultural topics for The New York Times, the Guardian, New York Magazine, and i-D, amongst other publications. She is the co-author of a walking guide, “Paris in Stride” that was published by Rizzoli this spring.

Martin Gayford Martin Gayford is the author of books on Constable, Van Gogh, and Michelangelo. He writes proliically on the visual arts and is art critic of the Spectator. Last year he published “A History of Pictures,” co-written with David Hockney, a sweeping survey of visual images of the world, including paintings, photographs and ilm from the prehistoric era to the computer age which has been translated, so far, into 14 languages. Gayford’s most recent publication is a survey of the work of the abstract painter Gillian Ayres, published in April 2017. He lives in Cambridge.

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The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors

INS OUTS 1 Stedelijk’s Chief Curator Bart van der Heide to Leave in November

The Stedelijk Museum’s chief curator and head of research, Bart van der Heide, will be leaving his post effective November 1, the museum has announced. “Van der Heide has decided to orient himself toward the next step in his career,” the interim director Jan Willem Sieburgh wrote in a statement. “We will greatly miss his substantive contribution and content knowledge and wish him every success with his next step.” Van der Heide joined the Stedelijk Museum in February 2015. Proir to that, he

Bart van der Heide

was the director of Kunstverein München. His previous positions included curator at the Cubitt Gallery in London and Witte de With in Rotterdam. Van der Heide’s departure follows several RWKHUKLJKSURÀOHGHSDUWXUHVDWWKHPXVHXP in the past year. The former director Beatrix Ruf left the museum in October 2017 amid allegations of running an art consultancy during her three-year tenure. She was cleared of the allegations, but three members of the Stedelijk’s supervisory board — Jos van Rooijen, Madeleine de Cock Buning and Rita Kersting — resigned in the aftermath. The museum’s board of supervisors said in a statement, “In the best interests of the museum, it is time to bring the recent turmoil to an end and start afresh.”

2 Yasufumi Nakamori Named Tate Modern’s Senior Curator of International Art

Tate Modern has announced that it has appointed Dr. Yasufumi Nakamori as its Senior Curator, International Art (Photography). Nakamori will lead the development of Tate’s collection of photography and the program of photography exhibitions and displays. He succeeds Simon Baker, who was the LQVWLWXWLRQ·VÀUVWSKRWRJUDSK\FXUDWRULQ 2003. He left in January to become director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Nakamori most recently was the head of the department of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. During his two years there, he developed new displays of photography and time-based media within the context of a global encyclopaedic art museum, staging exhibitions with Leslie Hewitt, the Propeller Group, Omer Fast, Naoya Hatakeyama and Amar Kanwar. Nakamori was also responsible for numerous key acquisitions, ZKLFKWUDQVIRUPHGDQGGLYHUVLÀHGWKH museum’s photography collection. Nakamori also served as curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts in

Yasufumi Nakamori

Houston from 2008 to 2016, creating groundbreaking exhibitions such as “Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (a recipient of the 2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums),” and “For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography,” 1968-1979. As a noted scholar of Japanese art and architecture, he has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs and has taught graduate seminars at Hunter College and Rice University. He has a doctorate in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University. “Nakamori’s appointment continues Tate’s commitment to collecting and exhibiting photography,” the Tate said in a statement. ´7KLVUHÁHFWVWKHSLYRWDOUROHSKRWRJUDSK\ has played in the story of Modern Art as well as its ever-greater importance in visual culture today.”

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Alison Jacques

Founder and director, Alison Jacques Gallery

Alison Jacques

14 MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2018 BLOUINARTINFO.COM

The gallerist has earned a solid reputation for quality and promoting women artists

P O R T R A I T: A L I S O N J AC Q U E S GA L L E R Y. © R I C K P U S H I N S K Y. D O U B L E S P R E A D : C O U R T E S Y O F A L I S O N J AC Q U E S GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N . © M A R S I E , E M A N U E L L E , DA M O N A N D A N D R E W S C H A R L AT T, H A N N A H W I L K E C O L L E C T I O N & A R C H I V E , LO S A N G E L E S . L I C E N S E D BY VAGA AT A R T I S T ’ S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K , DAC S , L O N D O N

GALLERY PROFILE

Hannah Wilke, solo exhibition, installation view.

Alison Jacques Gallery irst opened its doors in 2004 in a small townhouse off Bond Street before relocating, three years later, to its current site in London’s central Fitzrovia district. Since then, it has maintained a singlevenue presence, avoiding the expansionist zeal that tends to come with success, age and experience. The gallery’s program has remained noteworthy for its consistent and committed representation of women artists and their estates — from Lygia Clark and Hannah Wilke, to Sheila Hicks and Michelle Stuart — while also peppering its artist roster with both historically signiicant estates (Robert Mapplethorpe comes to mind) and a younger generation, such as Ryan Mosley or Takuro Kuwata. Anya Harrison spoke with the gallery’s founder and director, Alison Jacques, about its history, vision and plans for the future.

What first drove you to open the gallery? I irst got the idea when visiting the Unfair in Cologne in 1992, where I

interviewed White Cube’s Jay Jopling. Damien Hirst was doing his “twins” performance, and there was an air of something really exciting and important happening around that gallery. I noticed all the dealers had a lot of autonomy, which contrasted with my experience of working in museums where bureaucracy seemed to perennially slow things down, which didn’t sit well with my personality. However, I had no funds and no real contacts that might provide inancing, so I carried on with my curatorial work, realizing a series of exhibitions in domestic spaces, such as “Domestic Violence” in 1994 at Gio Marconi’s house. While news editor at “Flash Art,” I initiated a new section called “Cityscape,” for which I interviewed the legendary Cork Street dealer Leslie Waddington who then offered me a job, and became a true mentor. At Waddington’s, I sold my irst work of art, a painting by Ian Davenport, to a young British collector called Charles Asprey. We struck up a dialogue and over time decided to open a gallery together, Asprey

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Branko Vlahovic, “Untitled,” 1965-66, marker on paper, 70 x 100 cm./ 27 1/2 x 39 3/8 in., paper size, 81.2 x 112 x 3.4 cm./ 31 7/8 x 44 1/8 x 1 3/8 in., framed.

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C O U R T E S Y O F A L I S O N J AC Q U E S GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N . © T H E E S TAT E O F B R A N KO V L A H OV I
, Z AG R E B

Jacques Gallery, which ran for seven years. In 2004 it had run its course and I realized it was time to go it alone. I sold my flat and car and, with £50,000, set up Alison Jacques Gallery. What helped me was also to have my father’s work ethic in mind. He came from a workingclass background, but used his father’s tipper truck to start one of the UK’s key heavyhaulage companies. Lorries and art don’t seem to have that much in common, but if you work hard and maintain your drive and passion, you will succeed. Resilience has also come in very helpful, the art world can be tough and not everyone is self-made.

The gallery is notable for its representation of women artists and their estates. Was that always a very conscious position? Looking back at history and trying to ind artists who had been overlooked was deinitely a conscious choice. Many of these artists tended to be women largely because, until relatively recently, it was a white, male-dominated art world. Maria Bartuszová, for example, who died in 1996, was included in 2007’s documenta 12, but in her lifetime was completely unrecognized. My gallery is about the discovery and rediscovery of artists.

Working with someone like Sheila Hicks, facilitating her participation in Glasgow International and the Venice Biennale, as well as her retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, inspires me to keep focused and ensure my gallery stays on the map. I am deinitely interested in crossovers and dialogues between different periods and cultures — Latin America and Eastern Europe, for instance, although I have yet to get my head around the Asian art market. What is the vision that

has spurred you on since opening? Discovery, based on curiosity and a willingness to risk, deines my program. For instance, you can have a completely forgotten artist like Dorothea Tanning and take her on when she is 100 years old. With conviction, you can communicate that Dorothea wasn’t just Max Ernst’s wife of 30 years, not “just” a Surrealist painter, but that she was actually a great artist in her own right whose work spans over six decades. So, my job with artists — be they old, young, living or dead — is to

Branko Vlahovic, “SkulpturaI,” 1963, plaster, 17.5 x 13.5 x 13.5 cm./ 6 7/8 x 5 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

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B OT H I M AG E S : C O U R T E S Y O F A L I S O N J AC Q U E S GA L L E R Y. C O P Y R I G H T T H E A R T I S T

LEFT: Ian Kiaer, “Quick City, (orange),” 2018, varnish, pencil, acrylic, acetate on linen, 230 x 180 x 4 cm./ 90 1/2 x 70 7/8 x 15/8 in.

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RIGHT: Ian

Kiaer, “Quick City, (pink),” 2018, varnish, pencil, acrylic, acetate on linen, 230 x 180 x 4 cm./ 90 1/2 x 70 7/8 x 1 5/8 in.

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“I hope to mentor younger dealers rather than potentially steal from them, collaborate rather than control, and pick up the phone to discuss ideas rather than try to own something that someone else has helped to build. There is room for collaboration in the art world and, while competition is healthy, collaboration is so much more productive” spread the word about their importance and to achieve major museums shows for them. In the process, I build a market for their work, but that really is secondary. As idealistic as it sounds, I can honestly say I have never ever taken on an artist with money in mind. It’s always about a gut reaction to the work, and an unstoppable quest to learn more and be able to play a part in promoting or rediscovering that artist, to be a distinct and relentless voice for them and make everyone hear what I think they need to know. The continual question is, how do I bring all of this together in a new way and remain relevant but at the same time defend myself from the huge galleries with deep pockets and multicity venues? All I can say is that when I’m in my 80s, I hope to mentor younger dealers rather than potentially steal from them, collaborate rather than control, and pick up the phone to discuss ideas rather than try to own something that someone else has helped to build. There is room for collaboration in the art world and, while competition is healthy, collaboration is so much more productive.

How has the rise of art fairs globally affected, if at all, the gallery program? I don’t believe the rise of art fairs has affected the content of the gallery’s program but they have allowed us to reach more people and spread the word on our artists faster. I try to ensure our art fair presentations are curated and not purely about sales. An art fair booth is another exhibition space and should provide an arena for dialogue and discovery, not just a purely commercial focus. Can you tell us about any upcoming plans for the gallery? And how do you envision its future growth? I am constantly evaluating what we’re doing and where the gallery is going. Fourteen years in, we are working hard on the vision for the next 10 years. Does that mean a bigger space? Maybe. Does it mean more staff? Maybe. Ultimately though, all that matters is the program, my relationship with the artists and what we deliver for them. With the increasing number of major museum solo exhibitions for our artists, most of whom we represent exclusively, I think we are doing ok. MP

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Curated by BlouinShop

JOSEF ALBERS | Homage to the Square

WADDINGTON CUSTOT GALLERIES

The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors

No list can lay claims to being all-encompassing or definitive, and the below round-up of emerging talent should be read with that caveat in mind. Their inclusion is less about industry accolades they may have won, and more about the fact that their work — whether it takes the form of painting, sculpture, installation, video, text, performance, a hybrid of everything or nothing — resonates long after it’s been seen and experienced. These are cultural practitioners whom we are particularly excited to be following in the current moment

ANYA HARRISON

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10 YOUNG ARTISTS TO WATCH

LAWRENCE LEK

P H OTO © E B

In his speculative ictions that often combine video game animation and 3D software, the Frankfurtborn, London-based artist creates digitally enhanced near-futures that address the impact of the virtual on our perception of the real, and uncover the deeply embedded infrastructures governing our technological era. With a background in architecture, Lek creates animated videos and experiments in VR that habitually bleed off the screen into “IRL” space as complementary installations — eerie worldbuilding exercises with all-too-real renditions of cultural institutions or urban landscapes, from Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art to London’s Royal Academy of Arts, albeit devoid of human presence. For “Geomancer” (2017), a 48-minute-long CGI Bildungsroman that was commissioned as part of the 2017 Jerwood/FVU Award and went on to show at the Venice Biennale that same year, Lek propels us into 2065 to imagine a future in which advanced AI is no longer a distant technological utopia (or dystopia, depending on your views), but the fabric of everyday reality. Behind the humor and real-life entertainment that his works offer — “Play Station” (2017) was a hybrid interactive video game installation and accompanying ilm that posited viewers in an alternative workplace, where labor is disguised as leisure — Lek ultimately foregrounds the politics of the image in an age of accelerated capitalism where alienated labor and the corporatization of culture rule supreme.

RTINFO.COM

P H OTO C R E D I T E L L E N D O N N E L LY

CHRISTINA QUARLES

Women — or at least, female bodies — populate the Los Angeles-based artist’s semiigurative, erotically-charged, deinitively surreal-tinged canvases that teeter on the brink of abstraction. They contort, their limbs grow, dislocate and fuse sensuously into other objects or other bodies, pushing against the conines of the picture frame in what Quarles has previously termed an “excess of representation.” In her paintings, we are never quite sure of what — or who — is in front of us, as all legible markers of subjectivity are routinely erased or jumbled. Quarles is a queer African American woman herself, whose own fair skin often confounds immediate categorization. Her painterly world is an unstable one, where things are perennially in flux and skin tones range from fleshy-colored oranges and pinks to blues and yellows. In her paintings, perspective collapses, and sections of raw, untouched canvas vie with layers upon layers of color, stroke, blurring as legibility becomes increasingly complicated and shape-shifting. At their core, these works challenge assumptions and preconceptions linked to notions of ixed subjectivity and identity, and confusion reigns.

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Since completing her studies at London’s Goldsmiths University and Royal College of Art in 2007 and 2013 respectively, Makhacheva has split her time between Moscow and the southern city of Makhachkala in her native Dagestan, a place whose sociocultural history and multi-ethnic traditions, speciically before its forced assimilation into the Soviet Union, regularly informs her practice, which incorporates video, performance and objects. More recently, however, Makhacheva’s work has taken on new formats, all the while continuing to explore the tangled relationship between history (or histories), memory and place. For the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, the artist developed the sculptural installation “ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) Spa” where visitors can experience an individual facial treatment that includes surface assessment, deep cleansing and plastifying masks. The pampering sessions, however, are accompanied by the beautician’s telling of stories about artworks that have disappeared throughout the history of art, as the viewer becomes a passive sculptural subject in the process. In other works, the artist occasionally effaces herself to give way to her alter ego, Super Taus, who, according to Lisson Gallery, where the artist recently performed, “engages with her ancestral home of Dagestan, using strength to create provocative and ironic pieces.”

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COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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TAUS MAKHACHEVA

PHOTO BY BERNICE MULENGA

VICTORIA SIN

Toronto-born, London-based artist Victoria Sin deies categorization, working across performance, moving image and writing to, in the artist’s own words, “interrupt normative processes of desire, identiication and objectiication.” One of the prisms through which Sin does this is drag. Think Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” but on steroids, although Jessica Rabbit is also a point of reference. Performing — whether live or mediated through a screen — as an exuberantly hyperbolized version of the Hollywood blonde-shell sexpot, Sin challenges the reductive nature of binary approaches to identity, speciically when it comes to gender, sex and race (with mixed-race roots, Sin’s choice of drag clearly speaks of racialized bodies, too). Their reimagining of societal — and largely patriarchal — strictures and norms means that science iction and speculative iction, as tools for rewriting naturalized and colonial narratives, it naturally within their practice. Dream Babes is one such long-term project that sees Sin read from texts with fellow artist Evan Ifekoya (but which also brings in other practitioners), through language realizing a desire for a more sustainable world and mode of being.

Working primarily with moving image, videos by the Scottish artist are a dizzying, whirlwind journey down a rabbit hole or two. Hypersaturated, melding saccharinely sweet, kitsch aesthetics with darker undercurrents, and peopled by improbable characters mainly played by the chameleon-like Maclean herself — aided by makeup and prosthetics — her work serves as a satirical riposte to the dark and unstable times we live in now. “Spite Your Face,” which was produced for the 2017 Venice Biennale, where Maclean represented Scotland (and which is currently on view as part of the artist’s solo presentation at London’s Zabludowicz Collection), is a disturbing remake of the classical Pinocchio tale updated to a contemporary context where “untruth” — or “alternative facts” — leads the way. Her most recent work, “Make Me Up” (2018), and the irst in which she has incorporated actors, sees the ever-helpful Siri and Alexa trapped in a dysfunctional beauty clinic which is presided over by, according to the ilm’s website, “an authoritarian diva who speaks entirely with the voice of Kenneth Clark from the 1960s BBC Series ‘Civilisation.’ ” As with all of Maclean’s work to date, the cutesy OTT décors belie a sinister reality hidden beneath.

P H OTO : DAV I D B E B B E R . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D Z A B L U D O W I C Z C O L L E C T I O N .

10 YOUNG ARTISTS TO WATCH

RACHEL MACLEAN

P H OTO : DA N W E I L L

HARDEEP PANDHAL

In “Self-Loathing Flashmob,” his solo presentation as part of this year’s biannual Glasgow International festival, Hardeep Pandhal combined video, sound, drawing and sculpture to bring forth a fantastic — and, despite the inherent humor and silliness, confrontational — questioning of assimilation and belonging. Often rifing on his own background as a secondgeneration British Sikh raised in Birmingham but now based in Glasgow, “Self-Loathing Flashmob” was populated by schizoid 2D cut-out igures, pulsating beats and, on the second floor of Kelvin Hall where the exhibition took place, video footage of disenfranchised student protestors occupying a university lecture theater during the 2010 UK government education cuts. More broadly, whether exhibiting at Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2013) or the New Museum Triennial (2018), Pandhal relies heavily on animation, rap music, text and even embroidery to work through the convergence of colonial history, national identity, otherness, and popular culture while perverting the language of psychoanalysis, anthropological studies and advertising.

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Whether she is creating sculptures, videos, installations, performances or works-on-paper, and deploying materials such as spandex, silicone, Evian, Viagra, hormones and bacteria, the Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz inserts the human body into the center of her practice, even though that centrality often speaks of absence and immateriality. At the Venice Biennale in 2015, where Rosenkranz represented Switzerland, she illed the pavilion with musk perfume — whose potency, usually associated with feelings of desire, can equally incite disgust and nausea — and a fountain that bubbled up an equally attractive-repellent pinktoned liquid, its color a generic “European skin tone” concocted from trademarked ingredients used in the cosmetics industry. She’s illed water bottles with fleshcolored liquids — rifing on the marketing ploys deployed across the wellness industry to drive consumerism and the uptake of “natural” products — and smeared skin-toned pigments onto metallic emergency blankets, echoing Yves Klein’s iconic “Anthropometries” paintings. Rosenkranz’s pieces fuse the biological and molecular with commodity fetishism, commerce, art history, politics and the contemporary world of advertising, and in the process, attack all our senses with precision and stealth.

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IAN CHENG ALEX BACZYNSKIJENKINS

Shifting modes between performance and dance, the London- and Warsaw-based choreographer Alex BaczynskiJenkins creates semiimprovisational group situations that veer from the gentle and barely-there to the energetically frenzied, and which examine queer politics through ideas of desire, affection, intimacy — and its opposite, estrangement — and friendship. As part of his Chisenhale Gallery commission in 2017, “The tremble, the symptom, the swell and the hole together,” which was performed in four fortnightly chapters, eight performers veered from moments of intimacy and habitual gestures — such as delicately stroking another’s face with ingertips — to intense dancing, like a body possessed. Meantime, an earlier work, “Us Swerve” (2014), invited performers on rollerblades to circle and swerve endlessly around an interior space while reciting a queer archive of verse, sourced from poets such as Eileen Myles or Langston Hughes. At the time of writing, Baczynski-Jenkins was about to premiere a new body of work at London’s Frieze art fair, having been selected for the Frieze Artist Award earlier this year, the irst time the award has been given to an artist whose practice privileges time- and performancebased work.

Best known for his “Emissaries” trilogy (2015-17), densely populated artiicial reality works where each episode is a computer-generated simulation in which the action unfolds in open-ended narratives in real time, American artist Ian Cheng studies the nature of mutation and human behavior. With a background in cognitive science, and having worked with George Lucas’s special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, Cheng injects this experience into creating live simulations — as likely to be populated by hyper-intelligent dogs as by violent humans — that offer up an ininite cycle of action, growth, decay, war and peace that continues to evolve and mutate even when no one is watching. His role is really that of a scientist who programs his charges with behavioral drives before setting them free, letting “nature” and causality do their thing. One of his latest works, “BOB (Bag of Beliefs)” (2018), which was irst presented at the Serpentine Gallery in London earlier this year, turned the gallery into an animal sanctuary for the 21st century, with six screens that each hosted a sentient, AI being who fed off human interaction with the gallery’s visitors via smartphone, accruing a personality that was an amalgamation of these encounters.

P H OTO G R A P H E R C R E D I T I S TAY LO R R A I N B O LT, C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D B R I D G E T D O N A H U E , N YC .

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PAMELA ROSENKRANZ

MARTINE SYMS

A self-described “conceptual entrepreneur” based in her native Los Angeles, Martine Syms works primarily across performance and video — although she has also ventured into publishing, photography and sculpture — to examine representations of blackness and gender as shaped by the mass media. In one of her earliest pieces, “Notes on Gesture” (2015), Syms created a video of meme-like short clips in which an actress performs wildly exaggerated gestures against a purple backdrop (a conscious nod to Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”) in a mediated showcase of black femaleness. Her current show at London’s Sadie Coles, “Grand Calme,” includes a larger-than-life VR avatar of the artist that visitors are encouraged to text and chat with. Meanwhile, the walls of the gallery have been plastered with disjointed cut-and-paste phrases — including “WHO’S GOING TO GRAB MY BOOTY?,” “AM I GETTING FAT?” and “I have so much fucking work 2 do.” They snake around the space mimicking the aesthetics of “threat modelling,” a system used to seek out potential vulnerabilities in computer systems, but which is also highly reminiscent of the kiss-and-tell diagrammatic quizzes that were (perhaps still are) a mandatory staple of teenage girls’ glossy magazines.

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© S U C C E S S I O N B R A N C U S I , A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D/A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) , N E W YO R K /A DAG P, PA R I S . C O U R T E S Y E S TAT E O F C O N S TA N T I N B R A N C U S I .

Constantin Brancusi, “Torse de jeune fille (Torso of a Young Girl),” 1922, polished bronze, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.,/ 31.8 x 24.1 x 18.4 cm., Edition of 8, cast by Susse Fondeur, Paris in 2017.

BRANCUSI’S LEGACY SHINES ON IT IS IN NEW YORK THAT THE SCULPTOR’S WORKS CAN BE BEST EXPERIENCED THIS FALL, WITH T WO NEW EXHIBITIONS: AT THE MOMA AND THE PAUL K ASMIN GALLERY BY JÉ RÔME NEUTRE S

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C

onstantin Brancusi was born in Romania and settled in Paris in 1904. Yet the place he was most exhibited during his lifetime was New York: from his irst appearance at the Armory in 1913 to his retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1955. In fact, the avant-garde sculptor (1876-1957) rarely got a chance to exhibit in France and, even today, more than 60 years after his death, it is still in New York where his works can be experienced most comprehensively. Last year, the Guggenheim showed some of the Brancusi’s masterpieces from its exceptional collection as part of its “Visionaries” exhibition. This fall, “Brancusi Sculpture” is on view at MoMA through February 19, while the Paul Kasmin Gallery presents “Brancusi-Duchamp: the Art of Dialogue,” curated by the academic Paul B. Franklin, through December 22. These are rare events, as exhibiting Brancusi’s works has always been a challenge. The artist only produced around 220 sculptures, most of

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T H I S PAG E: © 2 017 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) , N E W YO R K / A DAG P, PA R I S . FAC I N G PAG E: © S U C C E S S I O N B R A N C U S I , A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D/A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) , N E W YO R K /A DAG P, PA R I S . C O U R T E S Y E S TAT E O F C O N S TA N T I N B R A N C U S I .

Constantin Brancusi, “Self-Portrait in the Studio,” 1920-22, gelatin silver print, 11 3/4 x 9 3/8 in. (29.9 x 23.9 cm.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Eyre de Lanux.

Constantin Brancusi, “Le Nouveau-Né [I] (Newborn [I]),” 1920, polished bronze, 5 7/8 x 8 3/8 x 5 7/8 in. / 15 x 21 x 15 cm, Edition of 8, cast by Susse Fondeur, Paris in 2003.

FOR SOME CURATORS, NO ARTWORK CAN EVER BE CONSIDERED LEGITIMATE UNLESS IT WAS FINALIZED BY THE ARTIST’S OWN HANDS. BUT WHAT ABOUT ARTISTS WHO NEVER TOUCHED A WORK? which are held today in the collections of major U.S. museums, or at the Pompidou Center (the French state inherited the artist’s studio and the works inside it in 1957; they are now displayed in a fascinating though rather unfriendly underground annex of the Paris museum). The delicate fragility of Brancusi’s sand-casting technique makes it dificult for museums to loan his works: a pity for the public, especially as Brancusi is so crucial to understanding many 20th-century artists — from the minimalist school of Dan Flavin and Carl Andre to Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor’s shining sculptures. The Beyeler Foundation presented a “BrancusiSerra” show in 2011, while the last major retrospective of the sculptor — in Paris and Philadelphia — was held in 1995. The current New York exhibitions offer two different, yet complementary approaches. At MoMA, a dense body of 11 sculptures, all masterpieces, are displayed in a single room like a skyline. This is appropriate: upon visiting New York, Brancusi once said “Manhattan is like my studio, on a large scale,” comparing the disparate lines of the buildings with the complex installation of his works at the Impasse Ronsin in Paris. The MoMA exhibition includes a mix of wood, marble, gold leaf and polished bronze sculptures — underlining how thoroughly

© S U C C E S S I O N B R A N C U S I , A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D/ A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) , N E W YO R K /A DAG P, PA R I S . C O U R T E S Y E S TAT E O F C O N S TA N T I N B R A N C U S I .

Constantin Brancusi, “Sophisticated Young Lady [Portrait of Nancy Cunard],” 1928-32, polished bronze, 21 5/8 x 5 7/8 x 8 5/8 in./ 54.9 x 14.9 x 21.9 cm., Edition 5, cast by Susse Fondeur, Paris, in 2013.

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Constantin Brancusi, “Young bird,”1928, bronze, 40.5 x 21 x 30.4 cm, on a two-part pedestal of limestone 23.5 cm high, and oak 60.3 cm high (carved by the artist), 121 x 46.3 x 14.6 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden.

Brancusi explored the medium of sculpture, developing his style through experiments with diverse materials. One wooden work, looking like a modern totem, is titled Socrates. In ancient Greece, the Oracle of Delphi named the Father of Philosophy the most intelligent person in the world: as he was the only one to know that he didn’t know. By using this title for his questionmark-shaped work, Brancusi hints at his quest to create a metaphysical sculpture. “Visual art creates ideas, it doesn’t represent them,” he once wrote: art becomes a way to understand the invisible truth of things. At the Kasmin Gallery (which has been representing the Brancusi Estate for the last ive years), Brancusi’s works are shown alongside those of his close friend, the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, and the dialogue throws new light on the relationship between the two artists. We know Duchamp was Brancusi’s longtime art dealer and curated some of his New York shows. But here we discover additional subtle artistic links between their oeuvres, including a mutual use of visual puns, eroticism, kinetics, and variations on a single subject. One notable difference with the MoMA show is that the Kasmin displays — in addition to one lifetime sculpture, two rare paintings and many vintage photographs by Brancusi — some posthumous works by the sculptor. “Leda,” “Princess X,” “Jeune ille sophistiquée,” and “The Newborn” are bronze editions cast after molds made by Brancusi. A perennial academic debate rages on between those who are “pro” and “anti” posthumous art works. For some curators, no artwork can ever be considered legitimate unless it was inalized by the artist’s own hands. But what about artists who (almost) never touched a work, like Rodin (whom Brancusi always recognized as his master)? In an article for ArtNet News, published last year during Rodin’s centennial, the art lawyer and Brancusi Estate representative JeanJacques Neuer wrote: “What complaints we hear when posthumous casts are produced, while artists such as Rodin never cast even the smallest bronze themselves! Do people seriously

think that Giacometti or Brancusi created their bronzes in the heat of their own ireplaces?” He concluded: “What really counts is the mind, not the hand.” Supported by an oficial approval from the French Supreme Court in 1966, the Brancusi Estate decided it had a duty to cast a few select works from the remaining molds that Brancusi left to the French artists Alexandre Istrati and Natalia Dumitresco, employing the same methods the sculptor used during his lifetime. For supporters of the Estate’s decision, these editions are the natural continuation of some of the iconic series Brancusi was exploring at the time of his death. For instance, his 1924 sculpture “The Cock” is displayed at MoMA in its wooden version — the only lifetime edition of the work. (Surely a highly meaningful work for the sculptor who reportedly said “The cock is me.”) At the Kasmin Gallery, meanwhile, a bronze version of the sculpture — cast after the plaster mold made by Brancusi’s hands — is on view. Why would the artist have left the plaster version of “The Cock” if not to have it cast later? Here we come to the heart of the dilemma encountered with the legacy of every artist dealing with “manufactured works,” whether photography, video, bronze or resin casts. Similar issues have been raised around Giacometti’s oeuvre. In the main room of the newly opened Giacometti Institute in Paris, one can see the bronze door of Edgar Kaufmann’s tomb, commissioned in 1952. But this impressive door-sculpture is not the initial one, loaned by the cemetery: it was cast recently by the famous Susse Foundry in Paris. It is doubtful that Giacometti himself ever planned making an edition of it: but no one can deny the pleasure and interest of exhibiting it. What does the market say? Since the collector John Quinn purchased the bronze “First Cry” in 1919 for $500 (the same one on view at MoMA),

© 2 018 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K / A DAG P, PA R I S . P H OTO: I M AG I N G A N D V I S UA L R E S O U R C E S D E PA R T M E N T, M O M A

Constantin Brancusi, “Mlle Pogany, version I,” 1913, bronze with black patina, 43.8 x 21.5 x 31.7 cm., on limestone base, 14.6 x 15.6 x 18.7 cm., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange).

Constantin Brancusi, “Maiastra,” 1910-12, white marble, 55.9 cm high, on three-part limestone pedestal 177.8 cm high, of which the middle section is double caryatid. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest.

© 2 018 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K / A DAG P, PA R I S . P H OTO: T H O M A S G R I E S E L

ONE THING IS CERTAIN: ART AUDIENCES ALL OVER THE WORLD DESERVE TO SEE MORE POWERFUL SCULPTURES BY THIS ESSENTIAL LANDMARK OF MODERN ART HISTORY the value of Brancusi’s sculptures has never stopped growing. An early “Sleeping Muse” reached $57.3 million in 2016 and the polished bronze “Jeune ille sophistiquée” was sold at Christie’s New York last spring for $71 million. A posthumous version of this last work is for sale at the Kasmin Gallery, with a seven-igure price tag. As Paul Kasmin explains: “the extreme rarity of lifetime works by Brancusi makes them priceless. But it is important to know that posthumous casts made by the Estate are also very limited; we’re talking about a few copies of a few pieces only.” One thing is certain: art audiences all over the world deserve to see more powerful sculptures by this essential landmark of Modern Art history. Taking into account the scarcity of Brancusi’s lifetime casts, more and more museums seem to be opening up to the opportunity offered by posthumous editions. “The public is as right as the artists,” Brancusi reportedly said. And yet the art-school controversy over the origin of art, residing more in the (holy) hand of the artist or in his manifested concept, continues. Fetishist desire versus aesthetic emotion? MP

Paula Rego, “Geppetto washing Pinocchio,” 1996, pastel on paper, mounted on aluminum, 213.4 x 152.54 cm., special collection.

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PAULA REGO’S

DARK FAIRY TALES

T H E PORT UGU ESE -BOR N A RT IST’S WOR KS, SHOW N A LONGSI DE M AST ERS W HO I N FLU ENCED H ER AT T H E MUSÉE DE L’OR A NGER I E , R EV EA L SOM E U NCOM FORTA BLE T RUT HS BY TOBIAS GREY

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Paula Rego, “The Policeman’s daughter,” 1987, acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas, 213.4 x 152.54 cm., private collection.

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aula Rego’s love affair with fairy tales began when she was a little girl in Portugal and her elderly aunt Ludgera told her stories that would go on for days, if not weeks. The stories were often cruel. One that Rego has described in the past was about a woodcutter who lived in a forest with his wife and three children. It ended with the wife, who had nothing for her husband to eat, cutting off her breasts and cooking them for him. “If you read Portuguese fairy tales, women and girls are depicted as sufferers in many of them,” Rego, 83, wrote in a recent email interview. “I recognized the cruelty from people who lived near me in the villages when I was young, the working people and the ishermen’s wives.” “The Cruel Stories of Paula Rego” is the unsparing title of the artist’s irst ever French museum show, on display at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris until January 14. Seventy of Rego’s paintings, pastels and drawings are being shown alongside engravings and other works by some of her favorite artists, such as Honoré Daumier, Francisco Goya, Edgar Degas and the French illustrator Benjamin Rabier. “I’m very honored to be shown with them, and they are a big influence,” Rego said. “But I’m not paying homage to anyone. I just respect them and love them.” Indeed, the exhibition contains some fascinating juxtapositions. One of these is provided by Rego’s “Dancing Ostriches” series of pastels alongside Degas’s delicate oil painting “Danseuses Bleues.” In Rego’s 1995 work she subverted a sequence of Walt Disney’s animated ilm “Fantasia” by replacing a troupe of dancing ostriches with middle-aged women. The contrast between their ungainly dance steps and the tip-toed elegance of the teenage dancers in Degas’s painting serves to deconstruct the male gaze. Rego began to consciously inject fairy-tale themes into her work in 1975 after she spent six months studying illustrators like Rabier, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham and Maxield Parrish at the British Museum and the British Library. She also made a study of Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Meaning and Importance of Fairy

©NICK WILLING

The painter Paula Rego in a scene from a film directed by her son Nick Willing, who gives a unique insight into his mother’s life and work.

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Paula Rego, “The Maids,” 1987, acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas, 213 x 244 cm., private collection.

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B OT H PAG E S : © C O P Y R I G H T PAU L A R E G O C O U R T E S Y M A R L B O R O U G H F I N E A R T

Paula Rego, “Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia (Triptich, right panel),” 1995, pastel on paper, mounted on aluminum, 150 x 150 cm., private collection.

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© PAU L A R E G O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B R I T I S H C O U N C I L C O L L E C T I O N

Paula Rego “Prey, “1986, acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas, 150 x 150 cm.

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Paula Rego, “Snare,” 1987, acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas, 150 x 150 cm.

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C O U R T E S Y P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N / B R I D G E M A N I M AG E S

Paula Rego, “The Dance,” 1988, acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas, 212,6 x 274 cm.

Tales” and read or re-read classic and lesser known works by acknowledged masters like the Grimm Brothers. “The reading I did helped to really bring back the excitement I had for fairy tales as a child,” Rego said. “I can’t really remember speciic works that particularly inspired me, though there were often Portuguese ones.” In the exhibition catalog the show’s French curator, Cécile Debray, situates Rego’s work “at a junction between the Baroque and Catholic sensibilities of Hispanic and Venetian art and the austerity of the School of London.” Rego, who learned how to draw at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, said that the two strains came together for her in the early 1980s, when she “started doing paintings of girls looking after dogs, which were about mixing torture and compassion.” In her 1987 painting “Snare,” which is included in the exhibition, a girl is shown tipping a dog onto its back and clutching its forepaws. The dog, with its tail in abeyance, is by no means relishing the experience. Rego produced a series of these “Girl and Dog” paintings, which she said in the email interview were “about my husband,” the British painter Victor Willing. For many years Willing suffered from multiple sclerosis, which often left him dependent on Rego and their three children for the most basic things like getting himself dressed and undressed. The exhibition includes one of Rego’s most courageous paintings, “The Dance,” which she did in 1988, the same year that her husband died. The large scale painting has the narrative power of a fairy tale, and shows several people dancing by the light of the moon. The most dominant igure in it is a woman in a billowing dress dancing by herself. Next to her there is a couple dancing cheek to cheek. Nick Willing’s insightful documentary about his mother, “Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories,” which came out last year, helps to untangle the personal nature of this scenario. In an interview for the documentary Rego revealed that the woman dancing alone is based on herself, while the man who is in the arms of another woman is her husband (Nick’s father). Throughout her career Rego has never shied away from painting or drawing what she sees, however uncomfortable the truth of it is. One of her most memorable pictures, “The Policeman’s Daughter” (1987), also included in the show, depicts a young woman with one hand shoved down the neck of a jackboot while the other one polishes it. “She’s ist-fucking it,” Rego said in the documentary, accompanied by her son’s audible gasp of surprise. For Rego, painting too is an act of domination which requires a certain amount of virility. “When I used to stand at the easel, with my feet planted on the ground, and I would paint or draw,” she said, “I just felt like I was a bloke.” MP BLOUINARTINFO.COM NOVEMBER 2018 MODERN PAINTERS

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TRANSCENDING RE-APPROPRIATION T H E A M ER ICA N A RT IST W I LL BOON E TA LKS A BOU T T H E I M PU L SE S A N D I N F LU ENCE S T H AT SH A PE H IS CAT EGORY-BUST I NG BODY OF WOR K BY CODY DELISTRATY

Will Boone, “Voyeur,” 2018, acrylic on canvas over wood panel, 74 x 60 3/4 x 1 1/4 in./ 188 x 154.3 x 3.2 cm.

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B OT H P I C S: P H OTO G R A P H Y: J E F F M C L A N E C O U R T E S Y O F DAV I D KO R DA N S K Y GA L L E R Y, LO S A N G E L E S , C A

Will Boone, “Detail of “Voyeur,” 2018, acrylic on canvas over wood panel, 74 x 60 3/4 x 1 1/4 in./ 188 x 154.3 x 3.2 cm.

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CD: You seem to have a particularly wide range of artistic interests. What binds it all together? WB: Well I always start with things that I’m interested in personally. It’s stuff that I come across in my life naturally. A lot of things I’m thinking about, I feel like I know that they’re signiicant, and I’m trying to understand why. Can you give an example? Being an artist is sort of like if you have a flashlight and you’re in a big

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Will Boone, “Security,” 2018, acrylic on canvas over wood panel, 74 x 78 1/2 x 1 1/4 in./ 188 x 199.4 x 3.2 cm.

dark cave, and the cave’s full of stuff and your job is to shine your flashlight on things so that people can see them. In this way — in the way that someone who’s a musician could write a song about something that is very ordinary or banal and the song can make it signiicant, or the song can make you think about it in a different way, or people can create their own relationships to it — it has this availability as this other thing to them. Tell me then a little bit about this show in Paris. What’s your goal with this exhibit? Well, there are masks. And these are more like paintings. This body of work I’ve been working on for so many years, and I wanted to really maximize them and push them and show them in this show in Paris. And so I increased their size, and there’s more color to them; they felt very graphic and flat before, and I started to use an airbrush in little areas to paint them. Then there is also this emblem that I’ve been working with in twodimensional work, and I built a three-dimensional version of it. It’s the Chevrolet logo as three sculptures. I like to cross-pollinate

things, taking things from my paintings and bringing them into my sculpture or taking things from my sculpture and bringing them into my paintings. There’s a core sense of Americana in your work — the Chevy logo, the cattle brand. How, if at all, does your work dialogue with the contemporary American political discourse? I don’t know — I hate that word, ‘Americana.’ I don’t know why. I think it sounds goofy. I feel like I work with material that I’m familiar with, and there’s no real choice to be like, ‘I’m going to work with American things,’ and I think it’s mainly because I spent the irst 27 years of my life in Houston, and then I left and I didn’t leave the States, really, until I was in my 30s so the things I’ve been interested in have always been fairly close to me. It’s what I think about and what I see and what I want to investigate and talk about in my work.

P H OTO G R A P H Y: J E F F M C L A N E C O U R T E S Y O F DAV I D KO R DA N S K Y GA L L E R Y, LO S A N

Will Boone, “Bad Milk,” 2018, acrylic on canvas over wood panel, 74 x 45 x 1 1/4 in./ 188 x 114.3 x 3.2 cm.

ill Boone is insatiably curious, mixing together memories from his skateboarding youth, symbols of punk rock music, horror ilms, cattle ranching, even the tribal masks he fell in love with as a young man on strolls through the Menil Collection in Houston — all in order to make radically original art. Born in Houston and now living in Los Angeles, the 36-year-old’s new exhibition at the Galerie Patrick Seguin in Paris will be his irst solo show in France and will also be on show at the capital’s principle art festival, FIAC, October 18-21. He’ll display mostly his so-called “masks,” mixtures of sculpture and painting that question and undermine typical semantic associations, from stereotypes of Americana to expectations of indigenous peoples. Boone spoke to Modern Painters about transcending reappropriation, the meaning of Americana in the current political climate (and his hatred of the term), and what it means to be successful as an artist. The interview has been edited for length.

P H OTO G R A P H Y: J E F F M C L A N E C O U R T E S Y O F DAV I D KO R DA N S K Y GA L L E R Y, LO S A N G E L E S , C A

Will Boone, “Freak,” 2018, acrylic on canvas over wood panel, 73 x 48 1/4 x 1 1/4 in./ 185.4 x 122.6 x 3.2 cm.

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P H OTO G R A P H Y: J E F F M C L A N E C O U R T E S Y O F DAV I D KO R DA N S K Y GA L L E R Y, LO S A N G E L E S , C A

Will Boone, “Ace,” 2018, acrylic on canvas over wood panel.

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But your work does seem to actively dialogue with specific archetypes, or perhaps stereotypes, of the American psyche... Yeah, with the mask paintings I started off examining the archetypes that are in masks and in appropriation and looking at Halloween masks and tribal masks and stuff like that. When I would go to a museum to see a mask — they have a lot of masks at the Menil Collection in Houston; then, when I lived in New York for a little while, I would go to the Met on Friday nights, when it’s open late — and I couldn’t stop thinking about them, and whenever I can’t stop thinking about something, I start to think about, how can it work its way into my work, or how can I make work about this thing? So I started working with these sorts of archetypes and appropriating things, and then where they kind of ended up was turning these things into masks. For instance, I made a mask out of an ace of spades playing card, and the work explored what that means because an ace can either be a high card or it can be a low card. Ace of spades is also called the death card. In Vietnam, US soldiers would put it in the mouths of dead Vietcong soldiers. So it just became about asking, what can these things become? So you’re able to transcend mere reappropriation since you’re searching for and finding new semantics or significances to these objects? Yeah, I think so. But there’s also just a playfulness to it. Making masks out of stuff — it’s a fun thing to do. That’s what I did when I was a kid. I don’t always really know what I’m doing, and sometimes I can igure it out, and sometimes I can’t. But I just try to stay close to making my work. When do you know when it’s working?

Will Boone, “Ace,” 2018, acrylic on canvas over wood panel.

That’s certainly a tough question. It’s a combination of things. A lot of times, I jump from thing to thing. A lot of times I’ll ind a material, or I’ll see something and I’ll want to make it an artwork using it, so I’ll bring a material into my studio and try to learn how to use it, like an airbrush. So sometimes there’s this challenge of just using the material, and then there’s making it into artwork. If I’m unhappy with something, I destroy it kind of quickly. I feel if it’s really meant to be, it will come back out in later works. It’s really like, if you can make the thing, and the thing feels independent of you — and I don’t matter, and it’s not like a painting by Will Boone, or whatever — and it has its own identity, its own life. And then it leaves, and I don’t have

anything to do with it anymore — only that I made it. That’s when my art is a success. For instance? I made a piece that was out in the desert — basically this bomb shelter that had a sculpture inside of it. It was just on the side of the road, so people became curious about what the hell this thing was and people would pull over and go and look at it, go down in there. They took their picture in there or whatever, and it wasn’t art to them; it was just this thing, this thing they were experiencing, and they didn’t know about who I was. They didn’t care about me. And that was kind of the most successful I’ve ever felt as an artist.MP

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© E R I K M A D I GA N H E C K / C O U R T E S Y C H R I S TO P H E G U Y E GA L L E R Y N AT I O N A A L A R C H I E F W I T H C R E AT I V E C O M M O N S

Erik Madigan Heck, “Muse, Old Future,” 2014, 1.016 x 0.762 m., chromogenic print.

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© D E L P H I N E D I A L LO - F I S H E Y E GA L L E R Y

THE YEAR OF THE WOMAN? T H E MOST R ECEN T EDI T ION M A K E S A CONSCIOUS EF FORT TO SHOWCASE T H E WOR K OF F E M A LE PHOTOGR A PH ERS. BU T T H E SYST E M ST I LL R E M A I NS U N BA L A NCED BY SARAH MOROZ Delphine Diallo, “Highness - Hybrid I,” 2011, 0.6 X 1.4 m. Argentique Photography.

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n September, Marie Docher, a French photographer and feminist activist, wrote an open letter in the French newspaper Libération to the director of the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, calling him out on the stark gender imbalance in the programming, and beseeching him to reset gender norms and spotlight work by women. Docher has created a free online platform — visuelles.art — devoted to interviews with female researchers, art historians, curators, and artists, to break down systematic gender discrimination. Her objective for the photo industry is, in a word, “awareness.” Today, she said, “photography reflects the way societal structures function — but it absolutely does not reflect society itself in the images exhibited, since they only feature a small, homogeneouslyconstructed social group.”

The professional slights take root early: over 60 percent of art school graduates are women, yet they represent just 20 percent of exhibited artists. Women not only receive fewer exhibitions than men, they are not integrated into permanent collections, are not cited within the narrative of the history of photography, nor do they have a strong enough presence within the ranks of arts administrations to call attention to these oversights, Docher and other advocates afirm. The patience with those who refuse move the agenda forward has grown thin. Docher said: “I’ve read: ‘I’m doing a group exhibition with 100 percent men but I’m organizing a conference about the emancipation of women.’ Thank you, but the emancipation of women dates from the last century and we would like to move on to something else, like a prominent place on a museum wall for example.”

© M A R T I N PA R R / M AG N U M P H OTO S / GA L L E R Y: D E W I L E W I S

Martin Parr, from “Small World,” 2018.

- PHOTOGRAPHY / GALLERY: KERBER ; © CÉDRIC DELSAUX / COURTESY EAST WING; © POLARIS GALLERY, PARIS

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: © D E L P H I N E D I A L LO - F I S H E Y E GA L L E R Y; © TO B I A S K R U S E / OA

Clockwise from top left: Delphine Diallo, “Highness - Rebirth,” 2016, 0,5 x 0,75 m., Argentique Photography; Tobias Kruse, from the ‘Material series,’ 2018. Cédric Delsaux, “Destroyer Unit 53,” from the series, ‘Back to the Stars,’ 2018, 80 x 108 cm., Archival Digital Print. Louis Heilbronn, “After Mirror (Orchard Continued),” 2017, 40 x 61cm., dgital c-print .

© E R I K M A D I GA N H E C K / C O U R T E S Y C H R I S TO P H E G U Y E GA L L E R Y

Erik Madigan Heck, “Without A Face (Red), Old Future,” 2013, 1.524 x 1.016 m., chromogenic print.

Erik Madigan Heck, “Without A Face (Yellow), Old Future,” 2013, 1.524 x 1.016 m., chromogenic print.

© E R I K M A D I GA N H E C K / C O U R T E S Y C H R I S TO P H E G U Y E GA L L E R Y

“The history of photography has never been written from a women’s point of view, so it’s been less evident to consider women as key figures. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t been integral to it” President Macron’s Ministry of Culture is making pro-active steps to correct gender inequality, both relative to institutional programming selection and behind-the-scenes positions of power. At the behest of the ministry, therefore, the 22nd edition of Paris Photo will “honor” women photographers this year. If it sounds a bit like ignoring someone all year but then breathlessly wishing them a happy birthday, perhaps it is. But Paris Photo is a key gathering point for those in the milieu, which will draw 166 galleries from 28 countries. It highlights new trends and important archives to a cross-section of both Parisian passers-by and marketdriving personalities, making it somewhat of a weathervane for the scene. In a just-right choice, Mickalene Thomas’s vivid, powerful “Calder Series #2” is the featured image for the fair on posters and press materials. For this edition, threaded throughout the booths is a cross-gallery circuit called “Elles x Paris Photo.” Fannie Escoulen, a freelance curator specializing in contemporary photography and a former assistant director at Le BAL in Paris, has coordinated an itinerary that spans 100 works by female photographers from Lucia Moholy to Arlene Gottfried to Wiame Haddad. Escoulen admitted she

gave the question of gender “little attention” in the past, but said: “when the issue was brought to me, it opened my eyes.” She contacted galleries participating in Paris Photo at the beginning of the summer, asking them to consider showcasing women if they hadn’t planned on it. About half the galleries participated in some way — she cites Richard Saltoun Gallery in London, Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, and Galerie Sator in Paris as especially open to the task. Escoulen’s goal was to “bring attention to little-known artists, or ones deserving of being rediscovered.” Amongst them she cites the Hungarian photographer Anna Barna (whose photographs of dolls evoke the work of Hans Bellmer), Margaret Watkins (a Canadian who had a flourishing career in advertising), and the Japanese writer and photographer Mao Ishikawa (who produced a striking series on hostesses in bars in Okinawa, adjacent to the American military base). “We disseminate a lot of stereotypes, and simplify women’s role in photography,” Escoulen said. She cited the reductive presumption that female photographers focus essentially on their own bodies or maternity as subjects, and are never considered as, say, photojournalists. (For the fair, The New York Times in fact organized “Hard Truths,” a group exhibition featuring photojournalist work, including that of Meridith Kohut and Newsha Tavakolian.) “The history of photography has never been written from a women’s point of view, so it’s been less evident to consider women as key igures. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t been integral to it; just that they have been underrepresented,” Esoulen stated. Docher emphasized how entrenched the misogyny is in the ield. “At the beginning of photography, the Société Française de Photographie was forbidden to women, unlike the British Royal Photographic Society,” she said. “I cannot help thinking about it.” Today, Escoulen said, if she had the

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power to program a cultural space, she would pay attention to gender, although as an independent curator she feels she has less agency. “I hope that it will lead to other research, to revise the history of photography,” she said. It’s part of the intention behind the complementary talk she is hosting, which offers headto-head discussions with professionals like the editor/artist Delphine Bedel; photography historian Taous Dahmani; the chief curator for photography at the Petit Palais, Susana Gallego Cuesto; commissioner of the JP Morgan Collection, Charlotte Eyerman; and director of the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Gabriele Schor. They will present different points of view on questions of public versus private collections and the world of publishing, amongst other topics.

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Another female-forward component of this year’s fair is a new curated sector called “Curiosa,” which will explore the theme of the body, sexuality and eroticism in photography. The curator, Martha Kirszenbaum — who will also curate the French Pavilion in 2019 for the 58th Venice Biennale, working alongside the artist Laure Prouvost in the irst-ever female duo for France — decided to use erotic photography as a point of departure to explore and deconstruct binary representations of body and identity, both sexual and social. (“It might be really shocking — we selected quite freely,” she mused.) The themes are parsed across sub-sectors, beginning with traditional “suggestive pose clichés” of the male gaze, as exempliied by the work of Nobuyoshi Araki.

RIGHT: ML Casteel, from “American Interiors,” 2018.

Another grouping puts forth feminist practices, like those of the avantgardistes Natalia LL or Renate Bertlmann. Curiosa will also emphasize “fragmented masculinity and the weakened male body,” as Kirszenbaum described it, featuring Antoine d’Agata and Karoly Halasz, plus photographers like Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who actively embrace race and homoerotic themes. Kirszenbaum feels that “men addressing their own fragility” is an important counterpoint to stretching conceptions of gender. Ultimately, honoring women is an important step, but showcasing professional female creativity needs to become uneventful. “Everyone is aware of the problems. There is a simple solution: exhibit women,” Docher said. “Opening your eyes to a system — being aware of one side or the other — can be violent. But the discussions are very quickly illed with interesting questions, and those are exciting moments.”MP

L E F T: © P I E T R O P R I V I T E R A / GA L L E R Y: P H OTO & C O N T E M P O R A R Y; R I G H T: © M L C A S T E E L / GA L L E R Y: D E W I L E W I S

Another female-forward component of this year’s fair is a new curated sector called “Curiosa,” which will explore the theme of the body, sexuality and eroticism in photography

LEFT: Pietro Privitera, “Escher’s Vertigo,” 2015, 0,4 x 0,4 m., hahnemüle fine art baryta paper.

© M I C K A L E N E T H O M A S C A L D E R S E R I E S # 2 , 2 013 C O LO R P H OTO G R A P H . C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T & GA L E R I E N AT H A L I E O B A D I A , PA R I S / B R U S S E L S

Official image, Paris Photo, 2018.

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Andy Warhol (1928–1987), “Flowers,” 1964, fluorescent paint and silkscreen ink on linen, 24 x 24 in./ 61 x 61 cm., The Art Institute of Chicago, the gift of Edlis/ Neeson Collection, 2015.

© T H E A N DY WA R H O L F O U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V I S UA L A R T S , I N C . / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) N E W YO R K

FROM COUTURE DON NA DE SA LVO, T H E CU R ATOR OF T H E A N DY WA R HOL R ET ROSPECT I V E AT T H E W H IT N EY MUSEUM I N N EW YOR K, DISCUSSES HOW T H E A RT IST DESTA BI LIZED T H E I M AGE

TO THE SUPERMARKET BY A MY ZION

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In the exhibition catalogue, Whitney director Adam Weinberg notes that you are part of the last generation of curators who actually met and engaged with Andy Warhol in his lifetime. “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again” comes out of many years of research and exhibitions you have done on Warhol since the 1980s. Is there a moment or something that spurred your engagement? I guess it begins with meeting Warhol. In a way, it came out of my work at the Dia Foundation, where they had this retrospective of his work. Warhol wasn’t that engaged then, the critical reception of his work was at a low point. It was really when I was trying to understand how did he get to the idea of the silk screen that I became fascinated by the work and I reached out to him. That’s how we met, and I found him to be very open, forthright, shy, very kind and funny. He seemed genuinely excited that a younger curator was interested in the work. At that point, in the mid-’80s, he started returning to hand painting and it really changed my attitude to the work. To be able to really hear it from the artist’s perspective, just changes everything.

Donna De Salvo

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And that dialogue fed into your exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery, “Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol” in 1989. Interestingly, it ran concurrent to the full retrospective at MoMA, and focused on the pre-Pop work of Warhol, from his student years in Pittsburgh and commercial jobs in Manhattan. Can we speak about that period leading into 1960-62, when Warhol began to use silk-screens in his artwork? Right, he made the irst silkscreen work in ’62, but back in

T H I S PAG E: P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M AT T H E W C A R A S E L L A . FAC I N G PAG E: © T H E A N DY WA R H O L F O U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V I S UA L A R T S , I N C . / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) N E W YO R K

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ndy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again” (November 12 to March 31) is the irst museum retrospective organized in the U.S. on the iconic and icon-obsessed American artist since the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition in 1989, and the second by the Whitney Museum since Warhol’s irst New York retrospective in 1971. Amy Zion sat down with the exhibition’s curator, Donna De Salvo, at the museum to discuss the show’s scope, its arguments, and how she locates her own, decades-long engagement with Warhol’s work in this latest presentation. Following is an edited and condensed version of the exchange.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987), “Living Room,” 1948, watercolor on paper, 15 x 20 in./ 38.1 x 50.8 cm., Collection of the Paul Warhola Family.

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And isn’t the overarching goal of this exhibition, the “A to B and Back Again,” to take the very wellknown roughly eight years of iconic work that begins in that early ’60s era, and to contextualize it within his entire output starting from his working class upbringing — do you include any of his childhood or adolescent drawings in the show? The earliest works in the show date from around ’48…

Andy Warhol, “Marilyn Diptych,” 1962, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and graphite on linen, 80 7/8 x 57 in./ 205.4 x 144.8 cm., Tate, London, purchase 1980.

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the ’50s, he was working as a commercial artist/ illustrator in New York. My argument is that Warhol was immersed in the industry which was very much about the mediated image, the printed image. What changes by 1960 is his subject matter. He’s not making the images that you see in the ’50s paintings, that you’ll see in the Whitney show: two boys about to kiss or little children. By ’60, he is making images of the Coke bottle, the Campbell Soup can — that’s a very big shift from the world of couture to the supermarket. He chooses things that have currency in the culture and are very symbolic of the United States, particularly the Coke bottle.

So that’s during college… Yes, they are works that he made while at Carnegie -— a very select group. But one painting, an assignment, depicts his family’s living room. I chose that work in particular because it gives, irst of all, a sense of Warhol trying to ind his way as an artist, it shows his capacity to impart a sense of personality to something, and it is also a snapshot of a very modest, working-class living room with a cruciix on the mantelpiece. I’m a big believer that irst you have to bring your audience in with things they know. So the irst room in the show contains more well-known works, and then you go back into the late ’40s and ’50s. But in that second room, I think people are going to be blown away that that’s Andy Warhol.

And this body of work speaks to the relationship between democracy and capitalism, it’s very much about class, wouldn’t you agree? Yes — class is the great unspoken thing in the United States — and that’s a big thing with Warhol. I dedicate the show to Emile de Antonio, a leftist ilmmaker who met Warhol in ’59. And one of the reasons is that he is one of four people that Warhol invites to the studio to look at the different versions of his Coke painting. When de Antonio sees the work, Warhol recalls him saying, “it’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and

That’s an interesting strategy, and it interrupts a chronological ordering which is one conventional way to layout a retrospective. Could you elaborate on how you structured the exhibition? This show is composed like building blocks, because another aim of the exhibition, in addition to seeing the ’50s as a foundational period, is also to show the full trajectory of Warhol’s work: that after the ’60s (which remain the period that he was so well-regarded for), he did an extraordinary amount of work in the ’70s and ’80s. That work, in his lifetime, was not well received;

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naked.” And that statement, is really exactly what you were saying, it’s an understanding of the nature of capitalism: that it’s “naked,” it’s brutal. It’s also that he chooses to make the painting at that large scale — it’s another kind of heroic image: a giant blown up Coke bottle. Warhol, a working-class kid, understands that he has to make money. So he’s connected to things in a different way than if he had a more entitled background. And the fact that he’s a workaholic and he’s savvy are all aspects of the presumed American Dream, our wonderful meritocracy so to speak, but it’s not the reality. So yes, class is a huge thing with Warhol.

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The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors

“WARHOL CHOOSES THINGS THAT HAVE CURRENCY IN THE CULTURE AND ARE VERY SYMBOLIC OF THE UNITED STATES, PARTICULARLY THE COKE BOTTLE” 68

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© T H E A N DY WA R H O L F O U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V I S UA L A R T S , I N C . / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) N E W YO R K

LEFT: Andy Warhol, “Green Coca-Cola Bottles,” 1962, silkscreen ink, acrylic, and graphite on linen, 82 3/4 x 57 1/8 in./ 210.2 x 145.1 cm., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

© T H E A N DY WA R H O L F O U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V I S UA L A R T S , I N C . / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ) N E W YO R K

but it’s absolutely fundamental to have a sense of the fuller picture. So I’m making an argument also by following the work itself and showing his full engagement. This exhibition, therefore, is trying to reconsider the period after Warhol was shot, after 1968. Not quite half the show is devoted to the work of that period. And that’s the period when there are changes in the Factory, that’s the beginning of Interview Magazine… Exactly, Interview was founded in 1969, The Factory changes, gets a bullet-proof door — there’s deinitely much less freedom, which is inevitable after such a horriic thing, and a desire on his part to go back to painting. He starts the Mao Series, and the subject matter is changing; Mao is the irst non-American, living igure (he painted Mona Lisa in the ’60s). But if you really look at the totality of his project, Warhol was actually engaged in a destabilizing of the image. Because everything that he does really undermines the notion of not just authenticity but this idea of the fluidity of these images and their ubiquitous

nature and also just this endless innovation. My argument has always been that the process of making art is absolutely reflected and reflects the reality of living: you go this way you go that way you come back, you make a mistake… it isn’t linear.

Andy Warhol, “Camouflage,” 1986, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 2.95 × 10.7 cm., The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT.

Can you describe some specific moments in the exhibition that illustrate this non-linearity? Yes, the show begins soon as you get off the elevator, there’s a big “Camouflage” painting, which is a later work. There’s a gallery full of his flower paintings installed on cow wallpaper, which is something he did in the Whitney ’71 exhibition — I got that idea from looking at installation photographs. The last room of the show is very kind of chapel-like: it has a “Camouflage Last Supper” from ’86, a very late work. You get this incredible tension between iguration and abstraction — the representation of abstraction and, in a way, the signiier of abstraction is the camouflage itself. So you start there, with the big camouflage painting and walk through the entire exhibition, to ind it again in the “Camouflage Last Supper.” MP

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WITH NO FIXED BOUNDARIES

Installation view of ‘Six Women,’ 2013-2015, “Bharti Kher. Starting points, points that bind,” DHC/Art Montreal, Canada, April 18–September 20, 2018.

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C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H

T H E WOR KS OF BH A RT I K H ER , ON E OF I N DI A’S MOST W ELL -K NOW N CON T E M POR A RY A RT ISTS , SE A M LE SSLY M ELD T H E M U LT I PLE I DEN T I T I E S OF A MODER N GLOBA L CI T I ZEN W HO DOE SN’T BELONG TO ON E PL ACE BY ARCHANA KHARE-GHOSE

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Bharti Kher

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come from different cultures yet get together to form a family. Considering that Kher has shows all over the world, it was a stroke of luck to have caught one of the best-known Contemporary Indian artists in her studio. Between July and December this year, she is or has been featured in solo or group exhibitions in a

wide arc across the globe — from New York to Tokyo, from Wolfsburg, Germany to Jaipur, India. Two of the most recent group shows are “I see you,” at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, U.S. (through December 30), and “Vision Exchange: Perspectives From India to Canada,” at Art Gallery

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had never been to Bharti Kher’s studio and therefore, when we agreed on an interview, I was a little worried about inding it in the maze of industrial units of Gurgaon despite the assistance of Google Maps. Increasingly being referred to by its new name of Gurugram, the millennium city neighbouring New Delhi is as well known for its high rises, high-end lifestyle and shopping malls as it is for the mess and confusion of factories and foundries. Turning the last bend on a particularly chaotic road, a modest building appeared with a prominent bullseye target high on a wall. Even before I could cross-check the address, I knew this was my destination. Bharti Kher Studio in many ways sums up the artist that it belongs to and the works that she produces: Easily noticeable, and potent enough to demand a second look. A recent example is “The Intermediary Family,” her unmissable 4.8-meter bronze sculpture that was on view at the Frieze Sculpture Park until October 7. The bronze sculpture, part of a series that Kher began some years ago, has been called “half things” by the artist in an interview — hybrid beings enmeshed together, and resembling igures or avatars of a mythological pantheon in their colorful attire. The three igures that make up the sculpture constitute a family grouping — man, woman and child — and are relatable for many global citizens who

C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R W I R T H P H OTO: S T E FA N A LT E N B U R G E R P H OTO G R A P H Y, Z Ü R I C H

Installation view, “Bharti Kher. Chimeras,” Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel, Switzerland, June 29–September 28, 2018.

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RIGHT: Bharti Kher, “Virus VIII,” 2017.

LEFT: Bharti Kher, “Sing to them that will listen,” 2008, rice grains with metal bowl, 110 x 31 x 31 cm.

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T H I S PAG E: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H P H OTO : S T E FA N A LT E N B U R G E R P H OTO G R A P H Y, Z Ü R I C H . FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H

Installation views, “Facing India,” Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, April 29– October 7, 2018.

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FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H P H OTO : M A R E K K R U S Z E W S K I ; T H I S PAG E: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D F R I E Z E P H OTO : S T E P H E N W H I T E

Bharti Kher, “The Intermediary Family,” 2018.

Alberta in Canada (through January 6, 2019). On November 1 began another group show of which she is a prominent part — at the Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace at Nahargarh fort in Jaipur. Meanwhile, two big solo shows are lined up for the coming months: “Djjins, Things, Places,” at Perrotin in Roppongi, Tokyo, beginning November 14, and another solo at Bikaner House in New Delhi that will launch the venue’s new wing in January next year. The latter promises to be especially interesting with many new works, one using the left behind saris of the sculptor (and friend of Kher’s) Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015). Kher, 49, has declared herself a studio person in quite a few interviews and I wonder how she juggles this identity with so many simultaneous shows that must involve a fair bit of travelling. “I work at a stretch and then travel,” she said. “There’s a certain rhythm that I’ve found. I make works simultaneously and over long periods and don’t feel the need to show them immediately. I keep an idea, recall it again and again. It doesn’t matter if a work was made six years ago or yesterday and has never been seen in the interim.” She likes being in the studio because that’s where all the material that she’s collected is kept, in the form of her thoughts in her diaries, or nuggets from the multiple books she is reading at any given time — all the material that is waiting to be created into something else. “And material gets activated by belief,” she said, adding, “by my fantasy and truth. It’s a crucial part of one’s life. You have to allow yourself the time to dream.”

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FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H . T H I S PAG E: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H A N D C E N T R E PA S Q U ’A R T

LEFT: Bharti Kher, “Mother,” 2016, plaster, wood, 140 x 63 x 96 cm.

RIGHT: Bharti Kher, “The Chimera (1),” 2016, wax, concrete, plaster, hessian fibre, brass, 49 × 11 3/8 × 11 3/8 in.

It’s interesting how this simple philosophy led to the creation of works that were a blockbuster hit on the Indian art horizon when they irst appeared, and resulted in an unmistakable Bharti Kher signature. Today, Kher’s work is one of the most recognizable in the pantheon of Contemporary Indian art and has an enviable following in international art circles, matched only by a few compatriots such as Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Amar Kanwar and Shilpa Gupta. The unique language that Kher developed was born out of symbols, and observations of acts and attitudes that are present everywhere, only waiting to metamorphose into a work of art. Who would have thought that a “bindi” — a small colored stick-on dot made of velvety paper, often red or maroon that Indian women wear on their foreheads — would be turned into an art element, helping create unforgettable works? Since the late 1990s, Kher has made many works with bindis and has left the interpretation to the viewer’s imagination. Bindis symbolize the third eye, a consciousness that she wishes to tap into. Her most wellknown work that uses this the bindi is the iconic iber-glass dying elephant lying prone on floor and covered with sperm shaped bindis. Titled “The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own,” (2006), it was one of the most expensive works of art by a Contemporary Indian artist sold at auction when one variation came up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2010, fetching £1.5 million. Questions about bindis are something that Kher must deinitely be tired of but can an artist escape the fame of her art? Kher answered

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Today, Kher’s work is one of the most recognizable in the pantheon of Contemporary Indian art and has an enviable following in international art circles, matched only by a few compatriots stoically, “All artists get categorized somewhat. But I’ve to be like music or water and keep moving or I get stagnant.” I preferred not to interject in the ensuing pause, and after a while, she continued, allowing herself the luxury of accepting that the language of bindis in Contemporary Indian art was a unique creation. She said, “The works are about perception. It allows me to create a language that is mine even if that may be nonsensical or spoken in prose.” She added after another pause, “But, I speak many languages through my work, do many different things.” Another question that Kher cannot escape — and which may be a reason why she is able to see things in India that those who have grown up there miss easily — concerns her own unique status of coming into India to live and work after growing up in London. That’s the reverse of the trend that has been popular among Indian artists for long. “I don’t know if I am an outsider, or if I belong to this world,” she said. Born in London to parents from Punjab, Kher studied at Middlesex Polytechnic, London, and received a BA Honors in Fine Art, Painting, from Newcastle Polytechnic. She

shifted to India when she met Subodh Gupta and made her home and studio there. During our interview, she spoke to a studio assistant in Hindi inflected heavily with English and informed me, “I learned Hindi when I arrived and I love this city even though it has many issues. I came here in my 20s and I have made many dear friends. I don’t know if I’m still an outsider, or qualify now to be an insider!” The issue has been a part of her sub-conscious for years, which has turned out in the “Intermediaries” series of sculptures, one of which was on view at the Frieze Sculpture Park. She described the “Intermediaries” series in an interview with the Evening Standard, London: “They are avatars of human psychology, the gods, the planets. They are djinns.” The larger sculpture in the series followed from the smaller clay and resin models that Kher started working on while on a residency with Hauser & Wirth in Somerset a year ago. Maybe, it’s best for an “intermediary” like Kher, one who travels fluidly between two cultures, to decode both ancient civilizations and our modern chaos.MP

C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H

Bharti Kher, “Hear with your eyes,” 2016, bindis on painted board, 96 1/8 × 72 in.

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P H OTO © B I R G I T U N D P E T E R K A I N Z , F R A N Z W E S T P R I VAT S T I F T U N G

Franz West, “Plakatentwurf Passstücke,” 2008, collage on cardboard, 144 x 133 cm., Project d’affiche, Passstück,Gagosian Gallery, New York, Franz West privatstiftung/ Estate Franz West, Vienna.

E E E R F H T L O T E H E E E R C F F ! L U T O E T R FE TLO FRRTH A E ! E T ! T H E O R E C A F A T U TO CH THE U TO T H E AUST R I A N A RT IST F R A NZ W E ST GETS A COM PR E H ENSI V E R ET ROSPEC T I V E AT T H E POM PI DOU CEN T ER I N PA R IS , W I T H 20 0 OF H IS U NCON V EN T IONA L WOR KS ON V I EW

BY CODY DELISTRATY

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In truth, West didn’t have so much of his own style

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not move with the vogues of his time, but rather remained steadfast in his genre-and era-defying style. The exhibition underscores those manifold shifts, beginning with his earliest, papier-mâché works, which can be touched, and works all the way through his large-scale, outdoor works, like “Auditorium,” an installation he made for Documenta in Kassel in 1992. “Auditorium” is a huge set of covered sofas, upon which viewers are encouraged to lie, appearing like a large-scale, outdoor therapy session led by Freud. (There are similar outdoor exhibitions accompanying the Pompidou exhibition nearby, at the Picasso Museum, the Cognacq-Jay Museum, and the Historic Library of the City of Paris.) Although the retrospective attempts to demonstrate West’s stylistic inventiveness, what it tends to do actually — and accidentally — is show the clever ways that he borrowed from other artists, using their aesthetic to match his needs. In truth, West didn’t have so much of his own style as he had an exceptional ability to co-opt the styles of others. The early artworks in his “Adaptives” series in the early 1980s, for instance, were mostly hard, white objects that appeared to have been taken straight from the painter Robert Ryman’s journals. And yet, the shift of course is that West made them wearable works, meant to be touched and held, artworks with which one might play. His personal stamp was always visible in how he manipulated more than in how he crafted. Similarly, when he began expanding on “Adaptives,” making chairs and sofas out of plaster and rebar, he was parodying the furniture design of the day — elegance at the expensive of comfort. The irony is that his faux-furniture, upon which one could, of course, sit, was actually reported to be quite comfortable. His parody-laden inventions were therefore also improvements. He did the same with sculpture — turning high art into touchable items. In all, this form of parody was not meant predominately as incisive satire or a takedown of a too-powerful aesthetic. It was simply for selfamusement. Still: he understood the seriousness of the silliness — how absurdity is vital in and of

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ranz West did not begin studying art until he was 30 years old, and even then he claimed not to be wholly sure of what he was doing. Born in Vienna in 1947 to a relatively well-to-do family — his father was a coal dealer, his mother was a dentist — his parents took him on trips throughout the Continent, mostly to Italy, in order to look at art. But when he inally matriculated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, at age 30, it was as though his style were already formed — if not fully, then at least mostly. Beginning with his use of everyday materials, like Coke bottles, polyester, and gauze, he was already considered a mature artist, at once a childish prankster and a man who had seen it all. Nearly every work was meant to be touched. One sculpture is bent so that it might it around the neck, an arm, a leg; a glass bottle is covered in papier-mâché — and you have to work against your impulse to simply reach out and grab it. His work is at once inventive and playful, but also serious — or not — about its freshness in art history. In more than three decades of working, West always seemed to be having a serious bit of fun. Now, the Pompidou Center in Paris is presenting about 200 of West’s works in a comprehensive retrospective until December 10. (The show will travel to the Tate Modern in London in February.) It’s a ittingly large and important show, especially given that West was overlooked for more than the irst decade of his career, in which his playful sculptures of the early 1970s weren’t critically acclaimed until the late 1980s. He would get a great deal of recognition later. He represented Austria at the 1990 Venice Biennale, had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1997, and he won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2011 — just a year before he died, at the age of 65. In many ways, though, his late start as an artist and the time it took for him to receive acclaim played to his advantage. One can neither categorize him by generation nor by decade. He did

Franz West, “Rrose/Drama,” 2001, aluminum and car-body paint, 210 x 540 x 240 cm., Telenor Art Collection, Franz West privatstiftung/ Estate Franz West, Vienna.

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P H OTO C O U R T E S Y S I X PAC K F I L M

Friedl Kubelka, “Graf Zokan (Franz West),” 1969, video, still from Graf Zokan [Franz West] (Black and white, 3 min.).

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itself. His later, lewder works — sculptures that looked like giant, colorful sausages or phalluses — underscored his undying devotion to this kind of artistic ridiculousness. Indeed, the “Adaptives” series could be literally worn, at once trapping and, as the critic Michael Brenson noted, also protecting the wearer. They turn the wearer into a walking prop, and yet, as sexualized as many of the shapes are, they’re still best understood as abstractions, a meandering of West’s subconscious. West used this kind of art to psychoanalyze himself, but, in dialoguing with his art, others could also do the same. At the Pompidou show, for

instance, visitors can watch themselves “touch” some of the works in his “Adaptives” series (here, at the Pompidou referred to in the German as “Paßstücke”) from the hidden space of a dressing room, thereby throwing into question the visible and the invisible — and how our sense of touch is or isn’t dictated by its public nature. The “Adaptives” shifted considerably once he began turning massive aluminum pieces into the shapes of phalluses or, supposedly, “Viennese sausages,” and they changed even more so when he gave them shockingly bright colors and new, more streamlined surfaces that invited sitting.

Franz West, “Sex Trivial,” 1972, gouache on paper , 14,3 x 21 cm., Private Collection, courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London / Hong Kong.

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The exhibition works its way toward what was probably

West’s era of greatest fame, in the 2000s, when he was creating works directly for his Gagosian Gallery shows, like collage posters and maquettes

T H I S PAG E: P H OTO © H A R A L D S C H O N F E L L I N G E R . FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y F R A N Z W E S T P R I VAT S T I F T U N G/ E S TAT E F R A N Z W E S T, V I E N N E .

Franz West, “Poster design (The Aluskulptur),” 2000, collage and gouache on paper, 86 x 61,5 cm.

Lemurenkopfe, Franz West Studios, 1992 plaster, gauze, cardboard, iron, acrylic, foam and rubber, four pieces: 243,8 x 127 x 121,9 cm./ 243,8 x 137,2 x 76,2 cm./ 218,4 x 124,5 x 53,3 cm. / 221 x 109,2 x 73,7 cm., Pinault collection.

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The exhibition works its way toward what was probably West’s era of greatest fame, in the 2000s, when he was creating works directly for his Gagosian Gallery shows, like collage posters and maquettes for his large-scale public works. Even in his 50s and 60s, West seemed strikingly young at heart. In a monograph of the artist, with an interview by Bice Curiger and published by Phaidon in 1999, West, who was then 52, said he couldn’t help but notice how different his artistic

desires became as he aged. And yet, he was still pushed toward doing the work he had done when he was much younger. “In some ways when you’re 50 you feel that the ideas you had when you were 25 seem too far away, but as a motif they seem interesting to me,” West told Curiger. He added that this way of looking back on his younger self is his fallback strategy for creativity. “Otherwise when I am pushed into something,” he said. “I really don’t know what to make.” MP

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Franz West, “Plakatentwurf,” 2001, acrylic paint and collage on cardboard, 104 x 152 cm., Project d’affiche, Gogasian Gallery, New York, Private collection Gernot Schauer.

Somogy Art Publishers since 1937 w w w. s o m o g y. n e t © Fonds Kandinsky / Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne Boris Lipnitzki, Wassily Kandinsky dans son atelier à Neuilly-sur-Seine devant Courbe dominante

ARCHITECTURE WITH A NATURAL CONNECTION A N I N T ERV I EW W I T H K ENGO KUM A , W HO IS BEH I N D T H E N EW V&A DU N DEE I N SCOT L A N D A N D T H E F U T U R E A LBERT K A H N M USEUM I N FR A NCE

@ K E N G O K U M A & A S S O C I AT E S - A R T E FAC TO R Y

BY DEVORAH LAUTER

An architectural rendering of the exterior of the Musée Albert Khan, located in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside Paris. The architect Kengo Kuma has designed the museum to integrate the beautiful garden surrounding it.

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ust outside the western edge of Paris, near a busy roundabout in the suburb of Boulogne, a shell of folded, metallic slats in various widths and angles faces the visitor like a highly reflective shield. From this vantage point, it is hard to imagine the oasis that lies hidden just beyond the tunneled entrance. Only upon entering this new building, the nearly completed Albert Kahn museum designed by the internationally renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, does the purpose of the outer buffer become clear. Step by step, the outside world starts to fade, giving way to a spacious interior that opens in a breath of sudden green onto shaded, historic gardens. Tall trees stand a few meters away from the two-story building and its garden façade of glass, iltered by hanging wooden slats, so that from the wooden catwalk on the upper floor — a kind of contemporary “engawa” or Japanese, covered terrace — the visitor can almost touch the branches. In today’s electronic age, the sensory awakening spurred by contact with an architectural design can, and should, be “healing,” says Kuma, who

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advocates for architecture that creates intimacy and warmth, through a relationship between nature and human beings. Wood, woven or latticed; smaller units; irregular organic forms; pieces joined without the use of nails or glue: these are some characteristic tools he explores to achieve those goals. Traditional Japanese design is an important source of inspiration for Kuma, who notes that the wisdom in these ancient building techniques can be used in contemporary designs that are more sustainable, light, and in dialogue with the environment. While he rejects the “large box” buildings of eficient industrial design, Kuma is no stranger to massive building projects, his most notable being the 2020 Tokyo Olympic stadium now under construction. He also recently completed Scotland’s irst design museum, the 8,000 square-meter V&A Dundee, which opened in September. The imposing structure uses rough stone panels to recall Scottish cliffs reaching over the riverbank below, reconnecting the city with its historic waterfront. But no matter the scale, Kuma’s buildings always return to nature and their surroundings for guidance.

STR ELK A INSTITUTE FOR MEDIA , ARCHITECTUR E AND DESIGN

Kengo Kuma at Strelka Institute.

@KENGO KUMA & A S S O C I AT E S - A R T E FAC TO R Y

An architectural rendering of the interior of the Musée Albert Khan. The architect of the museum, Kengo Kuma, said “We try to make every design detail as simple as possible, but people can still feel a sense of diversity through the material. We tried to combine wood and metal to show this.”

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“Even with a smaller scale in architecture, a new design can show the future of a city. I think we are just at the beginning,” said Kuma recently, sitting at a café opposite the Albert Kahn museum. Following is an edited version of that conversation. DL: What first inspired you to become an architect, and do you still feel the same way? KK: My most important moment was the Tokyo Olympics, 1964. Kenzo Tange was the star of that period. He designed the big Olympic gymnasium. It’s an amazing building, and still a masterpiece. My father brought me there when I was 10 years old, and I was so shocked to see that building. That was the irst time I heard of the architecture profession. That day I decided to become an architect. And I still remember that day, the impression of the building from afar, and from the interior. And I want to give that kind of strong emotion to visitors, with my buildings. Still today.

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Did you want to make buildings in the Tange stadium style, or with a similarly powerful effect? The great thing about Kenzo Tange is that he picked up the spirit of that period. His building was made with concrete and steel, and had very heroic gestures. I don’t want to follow that method, but I want to pick up the essence of the period, the heart of the time. And for my new Tokyo Olympic stadium, I want to pick up the spirit of the year 2020. 1964 was a year of economic expansion, and population explosion. But in 2020 there is an aging problem, and the problem of having too few children. In that kind of atmosphere, I still want to show what happiness there is in our period.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, “A view of the interior of the Musée Albert Kahn,” Client: General Council of Hauts-de-Seine, Site: Boulogne Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine department, France, Main use: Museum, Total floor area: N/C, Construction: 2015-2019.

Do you feel this population problem applies outside of Japan as well? Yes, China is facing a population decline. Japan is one of the irst examples of that trend, but now it happens everywhere. But picking up the spirit of the period by using another type of material can show a good example to the world. In what sense? Sustainability, and warmth. People want to be healed through material. Warm, intimate material can heal people, because people are stressed by computers, and also mentally, people are not so healthy. Wood gives some quietness to people. What is your ultimate goal when designing? To create relationships with nature and with the community. The goal of architecture is not to create shape. The real goal of architecture is to create a new relationship. For example, in Dundee, with that

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“Big, vacant spaces for cars can be used for humans. I think cities don’t need to expand. It’s a very strange answer to hear from an architect, but: no more big volumes”

An architectural rendering of the garden side of the museum. “The unique point of the project is that it has a beautiful Japanese garden,” said Kengo Kuma. “It’s a unique mixture of French and Japanese culture.”

building, the people can now ind the waterfront again. The building is a kind of gate to the waterfront, so a new relationship with nature started through it. Your designs use irregularity in the details, similarly to what is found in nature, and especially in woven forms, which you often explore. Yes, irregularity is very important. In the age of industrialization, people repeat the same detail and the same dimension, because it is the best method for mass production. But nature doesn’t repeat itself. Nature always has irregularity, but it is not intentional. What attracts you to the woven form in architecture? Weaving is a primitive method for making space. And also, many animals create their own nests with weaving methods. We should return to that kind of nest. The nest is a model of our future

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house. Animals pick up materials from their environment to create their comfortable nest, as we should do. When I was in Africa as a student we visited 100 villages, and each village had a different method of weaving, and they use different materials, techniques, and that kind of rich diversity can be the model of future design. Is there a creative direction you’d like to explore further? We still have this kind of motorization of the city, but in the future, the city will totally change. Instead of motorization, people will walk in cities. And for that kind of mobility, we should change cities drastically. Also, instead of oil, we should ind an alternative, newer energy system. The change of mobility and of energy can create a totally new urban design, and architecture should also follow that kind of drastic change.

A rendering of the exterior of the new museum building in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb just to the southwest of Paris.

How? Intimacy is most important. Instead of the big eficient box — that was the solution for modernization — we should create very intimate spaces, and it doesn’t need to it in with the eficiency of the city. The traditional houses can give us the answer to that kind of intimacy. Going from the big box to the traditional house, is a trend for future architectural design.

@ K E N G O K U M A & A S S O C I AT E S - A R T E FAC TO R Y

Can the traditional house still meet the needs of a dense city with little space? Yes. What’s happened already in Tokyo is that we have many vacant buildings and houses. If we can ind a way to use those vacant spaces, no more buildings are needed in the city. And we can restore those boxes into intimate spaces. With that kind of restoration, we can change the city very easily. Big, vacant spaces for cars can be used for humans. I think cities don’t need to expand. It’s a very strange answer to hear from an architect, but no more big volumes. About the Albert Kahn museum, what have been some of the most interesting aspects of the project for you? The unique point of the project is that it has a beautiful Japanese garden. It’s a unique mixture of French and Japanese culture. To work with that kind of product of exchange between two cultures, is very interesting for me. Cultural diversity is the most important theme of the museum, and the diversity I want to show here, is the diversity of simplicity. We try to make every design detail as simple as possible, but people can still feel a sense of diversity through the material. We tried to combine wood and metal to show this. Aluminum and natural-colored wood create a beautiful harmony. Can you describe the importance you find in bringing Japanese design to other cultures? I want to show the big potential of Japanese traditional design to France and to Europe.By inventing some new details based on Japanese traditional design, I want to show that Japanese design is not dead, is not in the past. It is basically very transparent and very light. That is the biggest reason we tried to bring Japanese design to this museum. It is also based on a very

“And now, because we are facing an environmental crisis, sustainability is very important. Japanese traditional design can give us many hints for how to solve environmental problems” sustainable philosophy. And now, because we are facing an environmental crisis, sustainability is very important. Japanese traditional design can give us many hints for how to solve environmental problems. For example, methods like designing a big roof, and the natural ventilation that it creates, or using local materials, are all hints for new, sustainable design. What are some other sustainable aspects of this project? We designed the engawa space. The engawa is a horizontal terrace between the exterior and interior, an in-between space with a roof over it. It is also a very sustainable device. The big roof and the long terrace are the best ways to control the interior environment. The surface of the engawa is also used for reflecting natural light, so the natural light mostly goes into the depths of the interior. What upcoming projects can you discuss? There was a new project just announced in Strasbourg, a parc d’exposition [exhibition center]. The mission was to reconnect the existing buildings, and to create some kind of pedestrian connection between them. So we proposed a wooden building, which they really liked. It’s very different from a normal exhibition center, which is a big concrete box. My building is totally made of wood, and has a very different atmosphere. People can enjoy a kind of warmth, even in an exhibition center. MP

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ERRÓ SEES THE WORLD IN

BLACK AND WHITE His brightly colored paintings and giant “scapes” have made the reputation of this post-pop master. They have also concealed his talent for dramatic gestures. This autumn, three exhibitions pay tribute to the “Black & White” series and works from this prince of narrative iguration P H OTO : AY M E R I C M A N TO U X

BY AYMERIC MANTOUX “Black Picasso,” 2015-2016, in Erro’s studio in Paris, on its way to the Reyckjavick City Museum, 105 X 158 cm.

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Erro, right, in Vienna with his gallerist Ernst Hilger, at the inauguration of a watercolor exhibition, in September 2017.

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rró is quite certainly the Picasso of our times,” says Stéphane Corréard, the French art collector, writer, and Contemporary art auction expert. Aged 86, Erró, whose real name is Gudmundur Gudmundsson, has been living and working in Paris for 60 years. Born in Iceland, he entered Reykjavik’s art college in 1949, before becoming a professor of art two years later. In 1952, Erró studied engraving, fresco and painting at Oslo’s academy in Norway. His irst personal exhibition took place in Florence in 1955, where he shared a studio with Fernando Botero. Three years later he settled in Paris and his work started to gain recognition. Erró has never pretended to create new images. Very modestly, he says he has just collected images from advertising, newspapers, comics and posters that inspired him. He chooses them, assembles them and accumulates them. In some of his compositions, he skillfully inserts characters from paintings by Picasso, Léger, Ingres or Delacroix, next to movie stars or political igures such as Marx or Mao. Amongst his great series are the Chinese cycle, the political series, and his erotic works. Since his irst retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1985, Erró has had many great exhibitions, in Madrid, New York, Palma de Majorca, Lyon and Valence, to name a few; and his works are housed in important museums and private collections. Last year, his irst solo show at Perrotin New

Inauguration of a watercolor exhibition of Erró in September 2017, Vienna, Gallery Ernst Hilger.

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Detail of a watercolor work by Erró presented in Vienna in 2017, Gallery Ernst Hilger.

York was sold out before it opened. In 2015, Picasso.mania was showcased at the Grand Palais in Paris, with three paintings by Erró. These are clear indications of the importance of his work, at a crossroads between modern art giants, pop art celebrities, comic icons and street art stars.

of painting like him, given the virtuosity of his colors, they just painted canvases in black and white, in Brueghel’s style, to make money. I found it amazing. Not only is the quality of their work remarkable, but the idea itself is great. This story was so beautiful, it inspired me for this series.

Why black and white after so many years painting bright colors? They are various reasons for this. I will just mention one. Brueghel was nicknamed velvet Brueghel, because he knew remarkably well how to paint flowers. To the point he worked a lot for other artists. But in reality, Brueghel had two sons. When he died, they both picked up his workshop. I’m telling you this, because I saw an exhibition dedicated to Brueghel and his sons in Vienna a few years back, and I remember being struck by a room illed with only black and white paintings. They were copies of paintings from Brueghel the elder by his sons. But as they were incapable

Must one see in this work a reference to your early black and white photographs from the 1960s? Yes, if you want. You just have to remember at the time color ilms were of very poor quality. They really appeared in 1965-1966 and at the beginning, the results were not very good. So if I used black and white at the time, it was mainly because it was better, the images were nicer, had a better contrast and depth of ield, but also because it was cheaper. As the proverb says, necessity is the mother of invention. Is it a kind of experimentation? Black and white is a different language. It is powerful, with

Last year, Erró’s first solo show at Perrotin New York was sold out before it opened. In 2015, Picasso.mania was showcased with three paintings by Erró. These are clear indications of the importance of his work

contrast. It also gives an oficial side, a vintage aspect, like television or archives before color. There is gravity added to the motive as well. Black and white questions memory. When you are confronted with it, you lose the notion of time. You are confused. Because it’s in black and white, does it necessarily imply it’s old? I quite like the fact that people are lost, just as it was the case last year during the irst ever exhibition of these works in Saint Gratien, near Paris. My art dealers [Louis Carré and Ernst Hilger], who know me well, were there. Each of them wished they could show the “Black & White” paintings. So I divided them in half. And there will also be an exhibition in Iceland [at the Reykjavik City Museum]. Is “Black & White” also a way for you to bring serenity, calm, in a world that has never been more fed up with images? [Erró shows a big format collage with his inger.] Yes, but not only. Here, see this poster project for the Yves Saint Laurent foundation? Well they sent me a very pretty book on Russian traditional costumes which I never had the heart to destroy. What I did was photocopy all the images and make a collage out of it. And the result is in black and white. But hey, it’s not all so new. When I settled in Paris at the end of the 1950s, you could not ind a lot of color printed material for collages. Most of the stuff you could ind was printed in black and white on very poor-quality

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“Chinese collage,” 2017, one of the 20 collages made by the artist for the luxury edition of the “Erro, Mao” book, published by Editions Cercle d’Art (Paris).

“It’s more about an aesthetic emotion. When I see an old movie in black and white, I find it prettier than in colors. The images are more homogenous. And it’s also much more effective”

Do you feel nostalgic? Not at all. It’s more about an aesthetic emotion. When I see an old movie in black and white, I ind it prettier than in colors. The images are more homogenous. And it’s also much more effective. Did you know that a lot of music lovers now turn their back on digital music and go back to vinyl discs? It’s better. There is something almost not measurable which makes amateurs prefer it. How did your admirers react to Erró paintings without colors? I can’t even tell you if most people really mattered. But I can’t let you say I suppressed colors. Black and white and all the other shades are real colors. They all have different tones. There is grey, and blue.

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What continues to inspire you? Whenever I rest, I get tired. When I work, I am it and time flies: a month is a week, a week is a day, a day an hour… So I never stop working. When I do nothing, I get bored easily. Just like a dog if you don’t take it out for a walk! What about when you leave for Spain or Thailand, do you work? Always. I invented a word in Spanish, it’s “Travacaciones”. It’s a mix of work and holidays. I do both at the same time. I’m always working. For instance right now, I’m already preparing the images and the mockups for the paintings I want to do when I’m in Formentera or in Thailand next year. Nevertheless, I’m starting to calm down a bit. It’s enough. I am currently working with Les Editions Cercle d’Art on the latest volume of my complete works, because I always have the feeling that, before they go to print in a book, my works aren’t really inished. It’s quite strange. But I’ve always kept it that way. MP

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paper. The only illustrated publication which was nicely printed, was L’Usine Nouvelle, which still exists. At the time I realized a whole series of works on the theme of progress, techniques and mechanics.

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Ian Davenport, “Colourscapes,“ installation view, September 20 — November 8, 2018.

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IAN DAVENPORT LINES UP HIS

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VISION T H E A BST R AC T PA I N T ER A N D T H E YOU NGE ST A RT IST EV ER TO R ECEI V E A T U R N ER NOM I NAT ION, DAV EN PORT H AS A R EPU TAT ION T H AT H AS ON LY ST E A DI LY GROW N I N R ECEN T Y E A RS BY M A R K PIGGOT T BLOUINARTINFO.COM NOVEMBER 2018 MODERN PAINTERS

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Portrait of Ian Davenport.

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P H OTO BY: J O O N E Y W O O D WA R D

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an Davenport’s art has grown more colorful as it has gone along. “Early in my career I worked mainly with monochrome,” he says, looking at his most recent pieces, which are eye-popping riots of every hue. We are in the Waddington Custot in London’s Mayfair, a gallery illed with light and an ideal setting to show off this exhibition, titled “Colourscapes.” Davenport is a young-looking and personable 51-year-old whose accent carries little trace of a somewhat nomadic British childhood. He was born in Kent, and his engineer father moved the family to Northern Ireland, which at the time was in a state of virtual civil war. The experience has influenced some of his work, in particular concepts of order and chaos. Though Davenport’s background was anything but artistic, his mother had hoped to be an illustrator and encouraged her children to draw and paint and, crucially, appreciate art. “In my bedroom as a kid I had a poster of ‘The Harvest’ by Vincent Van Gogh and it was a really important image to me,” says Davenport. “Recently I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and saw it again and it was amazing. In terms of color, he was someone I was completely surprised by. I grew up in Northern Ireland, then Northumbria. Then went to Cheshire and the color there is gray, pared down and soft; when you go to Provence the light is extraordinary, so I was really surprised that the Van Gogh painting, which I thought he must have imagined, he was replicating what he saw in France.” One of Davenport’s most recent pieces is “The Harvest Study (After Van Gogh)” but he is keen to point out that the work is less homage and more about how colors placed in conjunction. “The Harvest,” says Davenport, “is almost constructed of horizontal bands that disappear into the sky. When you flip my painting round you get a sense of that.” Many of Davenport’s artworks, including “The Harvest Study,” are created by pouring lines of paint down smooth surfaces using varying colors to represent mood, movement

and concept. Recently, Davenport started to allow the lines to form wax-like puddles at the base, giving his works a three-dimensional aspect. “When I started making paintings — even at the very beginning — I was intrigued irstly by the accuracy of the line the paint made but also by the way it extended onto the floor, by the way you could incorporate the floor section. They become sculpture paintings in a way. Maybe it was because I’d wanted to be a sculptor when I was younger but failed miserably! It felt much more natural to use paintings but in a sculptural way.” Davenport shows another of his larger works, “Cobalt Blue (after Manet),” based on Manet’s “Olympia.” “I’m very interested in art history and I’m interested in color, and I like the way I can put two things I like together,” says Davenport, his inger tracing a line of paint down to the floor. “Using another artists’ painting gives me something to work against if you like, something to lift colors from: it forces me to become more inventive. The Manet painting is quite pared down in its color. It forces you to put more interesting combinations together and come up with different solutions. I started doing this because I felt my color choices were becoming too predictable: I was putting things together that I just knew.” Creating paintings that extend out onto the floor creates a number of practical dificulties, not least when attempting to move them from his studio to a gallery. “I had been making a number of wall installations for exhibitions and shows but it was fraught with dificulty; the paint was so heavy and thick it would never dry in time. I did an exhibition in Rome and the paint was still drying on the floor. All the signs up saying, ‘wet paint — please do not touch’ and literally the irst person to come in went straight up to it and stuck his inger in! He was supposedly a well-known collector so he really should have known better!” When Davenport was asked to compose a piece for a Swatch commission in Venice he inally worked out a way of

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Ian Davenport, “Olympia,” 2018, acrylic on aluminium mounted onto aluminium panel (with additional floor section), 290 x 200 cm.

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Ian Davenport, “Colourscapes,” installation view, September 20 — November 8, 2018.

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Ian Davenport, “Carbon Black Splat,” 2018, acrylic on paper, 152.7 x 121.5 cm.

“I was trying to show kids how to do a wall painting but when I turned around they were squirting each other in the face. I thought, let’s go with what they want and do a splatter session. It was great fun, I loved it as well. These works have something punky about them, but they’re carefully balanced. I wanted to replicate that energy in the studio” moving the paintings. “We place very thin sheets of metal placed on the floor taped together. We just cut around that and it’s templated. From that template we can cut a metal plate which we laminate, then the metal can be dismantled and installed anywhere. I’m quite pleased with the technique — especially as my father was an engineer!” Not all of Davenport’s works are composed using the same technique. At the entrance to the gallery, a very different set are on display. His “Splat” pictures are the result of paint being squirted onto a vertical-hanging surface and then allowing the paint to trickle down in random patterns. One of these, “Neon Bang,” resembles a set of ireworks seen through a frosted window. “The germ of the idea came when I was doing a workshop with kids,” smiles Davenport. “I was trying to show them how to do a wall painting but when I turned around they were squirting each other in the face. I thought, let’s go with what they want and do a splatter session. It was great fun, I loved it as well. These works have something punky about them, but they’re carefully balanced. I wanted to replicate that energy in the studio.” Davenport found success early. At Goldsmiths in the late 1980s, he was a contemporary of Sarah Lucas, Michael Landy and Damien Hirst, who has said that his spot designs were inspired by Davenport’s “Splat” works. Now Davenport laughs off the idea he might have played some part in the astonishing success of his classmate, who included Davenport in the seminal 1988 show Freeze in London’s docklands. “I was so lucky at art college. It was a fabulous course. Freeze was exciting though I suppose at the time we didn’t

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understand how unusual it was. It’s only in retrospect I can think: that was amazing. There were great tutors and these artists had attitude. We were all looking at each other: it created a network of competition.” Much of the initial furore around the Young British Artists (YBAs) centered on their supposed shock value, but Davenport stresses a great artist can only survive on outrage for so long. “To sustain a career for 20 or 30 years needs a lot more going on. You need to replicate that again and again.” Davenport’s Turner nomination — the youngest artist ever to receive one — came just three years later, and since then his career and reputation have steadily grown. His work is on display at galleries across the world, including MOMA in New York, the Pompidou in Paris and Borusan in Istanbul. He has just returned from Texas, where he is overseeing a major exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. “There are eight to 10 recent paintings, plus about 10 older paintings as well one from 1988 to show context. Dallas Contemporary is enormous — one painting there is 50 feet wide and 12 feet high, yet it sits quite normally, it looks ine. I made a lot of big paintings early on, my generation was vying for attention!” With his career going from strength to strength, Davenport no longer needs to grab the public’s attention. So where does he see himself in ive or ten years? He shrugs. “I like to plan the next few months but after that I don’t really know. I’ve always followed my nose — as you get older you get more conident in that and happier with yourself and happier about making those decisions.” MP

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PREVIEWS& REVIEWS Not-to-bemissed shows this month

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel at New Museum Nothing is upright in the world of Sarah Lucas. Reclining, a favorite pose of hers, is a mode of being. Everything is slouched, improper, and blows smoke in the face of norms that govern human behavior. And yet, despite this slacker veneer, Lucas’s output is prodigious. On view through January 20, 2019, “Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” occupies three floors of the New Museum, includes over 150 artworks, and is the irst major survey in the U.S of the London-born artist. Lucas endows everyday objects from the household or nature with human-like features and they become puppets in the theater of life, or, more precisely, the tragicomedy of desire. No object is too modest for subliminal transformation. Stockings, eggs and cigarettes are some of her most prized materials. The sculpture series “Bunny Gets Snookered,” 1997, consists of eight languid forms made of stuffed flesh-colored stockings, dressed in colored stockings that are seated around an English billiards table. The splayed, frumpy legs fall where they may, the “ears” are more like limp antennas, and the unstuffed arms dangle helplessly over the backside of the chair. The title and tableaux allude to Playboy Bunnies, but the sculptures more closely resemble carrots drained of color and nutrition — an uncanny inversion of (erotic) consumption. Eggs appear in almost every medium of Lucas’s work: sculpture, self-portrait photography, video, and even a “collective action painting” entitled “One Thousand Eggs: For Women,” 2017, where participants threw eggs at a wall and their yolks

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Sarah Lucas, “Jubilee,” 2013, concrete and concrete paving slabs, 33 1/8 x 17 3/16 x 17 3/16 in./ 85 x 44.5 x 44.5 cm.

© Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

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there’s the perky cigarette protruding from her asshole, like a fuse. The longer one stares, the more face-like the backside becomes. Whereas the “Bunny” sculptures endow stuffed stockings with anthropoid characteristics, here the human body itself is fractured and reassembled. When Lucas adds a single cigarette to a sculpture it often has a comical effect, but elsewhere she uses cartons of cigarettes to cover a whole surface in meticulous, hypnotic patterns full of movement, like trafic viewed from an airplane. “Is Suicide Genetic?,” 1996, is a burnt fabric chair with charred armrests, the metal springs underneath ripped out, a helmet of cigarettes resting in the seat. The piece sketches a character: a stuntman forced into early retirement from a debilitating physical injury, but whose rocket-

Sarah Lucas, “Au Naturel,” 1994, mattress, melons, oranges, cucumber, and water bucket, 33 1/8 x 66 1/8 x 57 in./ 84 x 168.8 x 144.8 cm.

© S A R A H L U C A S . C O U R T E S Y S A D I E C O L E S H Q , LO N D O N

dripped down to a floor littered with egg shells. Beyond the symbolic allusions to fertility, there is something mischievous in the act of throwing an egg, and the perverse pleasure of doing so in a gallery setting. Another series of sculptures, “Muses,” provides a feminist commentary on the historical marginalization of women in art along the lines of the Guerrilla Girls poster, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?,” 1989. For this series, Lucas cast the lower half of her friends’ bodies in plaster as they lounged over domestic furniture (desk, chair, stool), as if modeling for a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Each sculpture has a cigarette planted in an oriice. For example, “Patricia,” 2015, leans over a table, one foot irmly planted as the other lolls behind, playfully. Then

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© S A R A H L U C A S . C O U R T E S Y S A D I E C O L E S H Q , LO N D O N

Sarah Lucas, “Self-portrait with Fried Eggs,” 1996, c-print, 60 x 48 in./ 152.4 x 121.9 cm.

B OT H I M AG E S : © S A R A H L U C A S . C O U R T E S Y S A D I E C O L E S H Q , LO N D O N

Sarah Lucas, “Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy,” 2003, fiberglass and cigarettes, 77 x 72 x 16 in./ 195.6 x 182.9 x 40.6 cm.

Sarah Lucas, “Bunny Gets Snookered #8,” 1997, blue tights, navy stockings, vinyl and wood chair, clamp, kapok, and wire, 39 x 34 x 31 1/8 in./ 99 x 86.5 x 79 cm.

fueled imagination, nursed over cigarettes, propels him out of his vegetated body to new cosmic heights. That work is, in a vague way, a precursor to one of Lucas’s newer pieces, “This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven,” 2018, an industrial-scale installation that splices a 2003 Jaguar car in half. The front is perfectly preserved and coated in a chainmail of cigarettes along the doors, roof, and raised hood revealing a V6 engine; while the rear has a charred interior and crumbs of shattered glass sprinkled around. In between these lie the car seats (one upright, the other on its back), dressed in a knitted sweater of cigarettes. The car could be a casualty of one of the stuntman’s performances, imagined or real. Sarah Lucas has a remarkably keen and critical eye for the ways societal norms influence human behavior and sexuality. Her irreverence is charming, hilarious and incredibly refreshing. She’s the irreverent plumber who unclogs the conventional, gender-speciic toilet in the end, and makes it into a open fountain that, at times, sprays you in the face. — CONNOR GOODWIN

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Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition of the Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi is a multicity show that spans three locations: Zurich, London and Hong Kong. Featuring several series of works, the overarching theme is to explore Zeng’s paintings though the dialogue between abstraction and representation. Zeng’s œuvre in his three-decade career includes portraiture and landscape, while the artist actively seeks to bring both Eastern and Western art forms together, creating a dialogue that fosters intercultural exchange. “Painting provides me with a gateway to stay in contact with the world,” Zeng comments in press materials for the show. “What I feel, see, hear, and think are all articulated through my paintings.” The artist was born in 1964 in Wuhan, China, and graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan in 1991. His experimental approach and his ability to evoke deep human emotions in his paintings quickly earned him international acclaim. Informed by Social Realist techniques of the 1985 New Wave movement in China during his training, his iconic “Meat Series” and “Hospital Triptychs” paved the way for his “Mask” and “Behind the Mask” series against the backdrop of the political and economic development of China. Although he has become a household name due to his success at auctions, setting impressive records, the artist has continued to reinvent himself and has found innovative ways to express his views of contemporary China through extensive research and a vast array of artistic mediums. The exhibition in the gallery’s London location showcases portraiture from the late 1980s onwards. Zeng refers to his

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Zeng Fanzhi, “Untitled,” 2018, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. / 39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.

igurative works as a genre that captures “the fundamental emotional state of humankind.” One of his works, “Victor Hugo” (2018), is an example of his recent series depicting cultural icons such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, which is a radical departure from his earlier

“Mask” series in the 1990s. Two decades later, Zeng has decided to return to selfportraits, in which the protagonist is himself bowing his head in contemplation, reflecting Zeng’s own meditation on his artistic career. In Zurich, the focus is not on portraiture, but instead on the abstract landscapes Zeng has created in the last

© Z E N G FA N Z H I C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H

“Zeng Fanzhi. In the Studio” at Hauser & Wirth

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Zeng Fanzhi, “Victor Hugo,”2018, oil on canvas, 180 x 180 cm./ 70 7/8 x 70 7/8 in.

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Installation view, ‘Zeng Fanzhi. In the Studio’, Hauser & Wirth Zürich 2018.

two years, displaying works in a style that emerged in 2002. The dark canvas becomes the vehicle that allows the rhythmic brushstrokes to sit on the surface. Vibrant, expressive flicks of the brush, layered in various hues of red, yellow, blue and white, give the illusion of depth on the plane of the canvas. The gestural approach is not unlike traditional Chinese calligraphy, capturing the speed at which the artist’s hand moves across the surface. The exploration of the connection between Chinese and Western aesthetics is the major theme of the Hong Kong section of this multi-city exhibition. There Zeng carefully draws inspiration from the work of the French painter Cézanne and the 10th-century Chinese artist Zhao Gan. In this new series of paintings, the color palette mainly consists of light blue, green, pink, gray and brown. Typical traditional Chinese painting motifs, such as trees and scholars’ rocks, are also shown in Zeng’s work. The brushstrokes, much flatter and less like drip paintings, recall Cézanne’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire” series, whereas the composition references Zhao Gan’s “Early Snow on the

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River.” Zeng’s interest in the work of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi also influences the way the objects are represented in this new series. It is as though it is a mixture of Western still life paintings and traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The interplay of these artistic styles marks the exciting occasion on which cultural exchange can be fostered among the exhibition’s three locations. — VALENCIA TONG

© Z E N G FA N Z H I ; C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H

RIGHT: Zeng Fanzhi, “Untitled,”2018, oil on canvas, 180 x 260 cm./ 70 7/8 x 102 3/8 in.

© Z E N G FA N Z H I C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H

Zeng Fanzhi, “Untitled,” 2018, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm./ 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.

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Anni Albers, “Study for an unexecuted wallhanging,” 1926, gouache with pencil photo offset paper.

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In 1941, the German artist Anni Albers drew parallels between the ancient craft of handweaving and its contemporary equivalent, the machine loom, in her seminal essay “Handweaving Today: Textile Work at Black Mountain College.” “Weaving in any form is a constructive process,” she wrote. “It is also a combinative process, demanding aesthetic judgement as to the surface, form and color qualities of the materials.” A master weaver herself, trained at the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop, irst in Weimar and then in Dessau, Albers approached weaving as a constantly evolving art form and, in so doing, propelled it from a quaint pastime into the vanguard of 20thcentury Modernism. Her influence and the evolution of her art is now the subject of the irst major solo retrospective of her work, running through January 27 at the Tate Modern in London. Born Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin in 1899, Albers enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1922, where she met her husband, Josef Albers, as well as other key Modernist igures, including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Despite the egalitarianism propounded by the school, painting was still considered a male pursuit — and so it was by default that Albers found herself surrounded by looms and textiles, rather than

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paintbrushes and canvas. Despite this, it would be misleading to assume that in the years that followed — which saw the Albers emigrating to the United States in 1933 following the rise of Nazism — that it was Josef who led

the way. Both members of the couple were invited to teach in the United States, irst at Black Mountain College and then at Yale. And while the signiicance of Josef’s teachings on color theory cannot be underestimated, it was Anni who

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A Master of Modernist Weaving: Tate Modern Celebrates Anni Albers

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Anni Albers, “Development in Rose I,” 1952 linen, plain and gauze weave pictorial weaving, 571 x 438 mm., The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

irst had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1949 — the irst woman from the Bauhaus to have this privilege, underlined Priyesh Mistry, Assistant Curator at the Tate Modern. According to Mistry, the Albers’ “passport” to the United States was, in fact, the soundproof, light-reflecting fabric Anni had produced for the auditorium of the Trade Union School in Bernau as her inal diploma work. This felt-like fabric, made using cellophane and chenille, both “dampened the sound of this musical auditorium,” Mistry explained, while the cellophane created “a metallic lustre, which, once the material was clad around the entire space, really allowed the light to shine through.” The boldness of her approach caught the attention of the American architect Philip Johnson, who extended an invitation to the couple to take up teaching positions at the progressive and newly founded Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina. Here, students at Anni Albers’s weaving workshops included Ruth Asawa and Sheila Hicks, both of whose practices embrace and are heavily indebted to the art of weaving. Albers’ pioneering spirit in relation to materials and textiles is at the crux of the Tate Modern exhibition, which brings together over 350 objects, many of them showing in Britain for the irst time. Although, in the hierarchy of art forms, weaving often continues to be viewed as a “craft,” Albers’s work and writings — including her groundbreaking essay anthologies “On Designing” (1959) and “On Weaving” (1965) — were instrumental in expanding ideas about textiles in relation to art. Between the early 1930s and mid-1960s Albers created woven artworks that she called “pictorial weavings.” Unusually for fabrics, these were not to be sat on, used, or touched: they were simply to be looked at. For Albers, these works were an attempt to explore the pictorial language of weaving, beyond its direct material applications. One such early piece, “Ancient Writing”

(1936), is revelatory in the way it draws parallels between the history of weaving and language. Here, a background of golden threads is overlaid with a narrower rectangle of black, which itself acts as a backdrop to smaller geometric forms of varying width and length, creating a visual language or code. The design and golden thread also nod to Albers’ lifelong fascination for pre-Columbian artefacts and textiles, which she irst discovered in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. Later, Albers would go on to develop a technique called a “floating weft” — evident in pieces such as “Six Prayers” (1966-7) or “Intersecting” (1962) — whereby an additional thread is added to the weave, lying on top of the surface, its undulating lines and curves suggestive of a linguistic script. Albers’s fascination for archaeology and pre-Columbian history was shared by her husband, and the two undertook 15 trips to Mexico, Chile, Cuba, and Peru between 1935 and 1967, each time collecting examples of local arts and crafts. Once home, Albers would systematically unpick each item, trying to get to the root of its creation. She saw each piece as representing “forms of communication and storytelling across generations,” said Mistry, the Tate Modern curator. Albers

was fascinated by how the “incredible weavings were created from memory, by remembering patterns and iconographies, a tradition and language that were very much embedded within the way textiles were made,” Mistry added. If Albers’s “pictorial weavings” elevated textiles beyond mere decorative function, the architectural commissions she undertook — such as the soundproof, lightreflecting fabric for the Trade Union School auditorium — took her ideas one step further, transforming textiles into an architectural feature. Invited by Philip Johnson to create draperies for the Rockefeller Guest House in New York in the 1940s, for example, Albers demonstrated the natural synergy between weaving and architecture as complementary models for construction and building. Working with chenille and copper thread, the draperies — according to Albers’s own description — looked like sacking in the daylight but, once drawn at night, and with the aid of electric light, would scintillate and transform the space around them. In this way, Albers once again reimagined how the ancient craft of weaving could hold its own in an age of Modernist minimalism, clean lines and ongoing technological developments. — ANYA HARRISON

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Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), “Wall Drawing #289,” 1976, wax crayon, graphite pencil, and paint on four walls, dimensions variable, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc.

“Programmed” at the Whitney The creeping web of companies headquartered in Silicon Valley have strongarmed their way into almost every aspect of our lives. What’s worse is that we practically invited them in for pie and coffee and divulged all our likes and dislikes to a notso-secret team of marketers, who then harvested all our data for their own purposes: sell some shoes, swing an election. Unfortunately, often you don’t realize just how much power something has over you until it’s too late. “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018,” a retrospective on conceptual and computational art drawn from the Whitney’s collection, features pioneering artists like Sol LeWitt, Nam June Paik, and more than 50 works by 39 artists responding to the revolutionary power of analog and digital

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technologies. On view through April 14, 2019, these artworks explore the spectrum between human will and algorithms, between paralyzing open networks and generative constraints, and reveals the endless scrolls of coded language neatly bound behind the dim glow of screens in our pockets. Much of the early work in the show, like the technology itself, simply did not age well. In the ’70s it may have been a marvel to generate a drawing using computer code, but that sense of awe has long dried up. One notable exception is “Lorna,” 1979-84, an interactive video installation by Lynn Hershman Leeson that invites viewers into the life of Lorna, a woman suffering from agoraphobia. The installation mirrors Lorna’s room as seen on TV. The objects around it — a goldish bowl, cheetah-print

heels, a wallet — are listed on the TV screen as options in a choose-your-own adventure via remote control. Each choice leads to different video clips that are equal parts surreal and ilm noir. The branching narrative can unfold in a number of ways, but there are only three endings: death, escape, or destroying the TV. Leeson offers an expansive commentary on our mediated existence and how we’re all, especially women, stifled and subjugated by forces beyond our control. “America’s Got No Talent,” 2012 and 2018, by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, chronicles a small slice of public discourse around American pop culture. The software application visualizes data in the form of a U.S. flag where the stripes are different American reality TV shows, like “America’s Next Top Model” and “American Idol.” As one moves the cursor over a TVstripe, archived tweets in response to that

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TOP LEFT: COURTESY WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, TOP RIGHT: © NAM JUNE PAIK ESTATE BOTTOM: © 2018 THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

Tamiko Thiel, “Unexpected Growth,” 2018, augmented reality installation, healthy phase. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Josef Albers, show pop up. The stars are “White Line a constellation of tweets Square VI,” 1966, that contain the words “No from the portfolio White Line Talent” and/or “America.” Squares (Series I), Unlike other pieces lithographs: sheet, 20 11/16 x where the concept is 20 11/16 in.; shrouded in a coded digital image, 15 11/16 x fog, here the concept 15 11/16 in. Whitney Museum registers almost of American Art, immediately. And while the New York. content in “America’s Got No Talent” is seemingly endless, it’s easy to navigate and userfriendly. Those two qualities — conceptual transparency and user navigability — make this piece a successful convergence between aesthetics, concept, and technology. More contemporary pieces in “Programmed” consider the ethics of technology with healthy skepticism as we reckon with corporate control over user data and unsustainable growth exacerbated by technologies. Satirizing the notion that technology is “neutral” and unbiased, “The Interactions of Colored,” 2012, by Mendi + Keith Obadike, features an interactive survey

advertised as “the world’s first online skin-color verification system” alongside a video that rapidly shutters through cropped photos of body parts. “Five Towers,” 1986, by Sol LeWitt is a an Ikea-like skeletal sculpture of white hollow cubes and is reminiscent of a futuristic urban design model — homogenized, overlysanitized, and empty.

“Unexpected Growth,” 2018, by Tamiko Thiel uses augmented reality, which overlays virtual images onto a camera-view of the real world, to bring attention to climate change and pollution. Hold up the iPad and suddenly the sixth floor of the Whitney is submerged underwater, as if the scientiic reports of rising ocean levels became true overnight. As the camera pans across the floor, bouquets of trash — plastic bottles, flip flops, and silverware — bloom from the ground like coral reefs. On one end of the spectrum of works in “Programmed” are those, like computer drawings, that give creative license to algorithms where the end product is predetermined by code. These are delightful thought experiments, but, when executed, come off as dull and arduous. On the other end, are more interactive pieces that give creative license to participants. This exhibit raises questions around creative authorship, but the question it raised for me is: can a work succeed in pushing the boundaries of what we consider to be art, while still failing as an individual artwork?

Nam June Paik, “Fin de Siecle II,” 1989, video installation, 201 television sets with four laser discs, 168 x 480 x 60 in., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Laila and Thurston Twigg-Smith.

— CONNOR GOODWIN

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“Sweating Blood,” 1973, Ana Mendieta Film super-8.

The Connections and Burdens of Ana Mendieta Upon entering “Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta,” a new exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the visitor encounters a photograph of a woman lying on an Aztec tomb, covered in weeds, grass and white flowers. It is an image of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, herself, who appears as vulnerable as she is camouflaged in the image, titled “Imagen de Yágul,” 1973/2018. The image is paired with two ilms she made in 1974 (“Burial Pyramid” and “Laberinth Blood Imprint”) and a quote in which Mendieta expresses how basking in these natural elements was like being “covered by time and history.” The phrase, which conjures up connections and burdens, inspired the title of this exhibition, which runs from October 16 to January 27. Howard Oransky, who irst encountered Mendieta’s work in 1978 and co-curated this

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show with Lynn Lukkas, said that Mendieta was always adept at “using her body and using the idea of the body” — of giving of herself while highlighting the pervasive expectations projected onto women. This show, which traveled in the U.S. and Germany before arriving in France, encompasses 20 video pieces that place the moving image as a centripetal force in Mendieta’s work. The selection draws from the artist’s archival ilmography of 104 videos which, over three years, was inventoried and digitized in high deinition (including a previously undiscovered work from 1981). Film provides an especially powerful entry point by which to explore recurrent themes for the artist: memory, ritual, gender and the powerful union between body and earth, in which nature serves as a raw tangible resource. For Oransky, the

historical importance of France to the development of photography and ilm, coupled with the pioneering warp of the French New Wave, feel like a poignant context in which to view Mendieta’s work, given this “revolution in the conception of ilm and cinema that asserted the importance of the artistic vision of the maker.” Mendieta’s short-lived career belies the pluridisciplinary body of the work she produced between 1971 to 1985, the year she died. In this exhibition, the artist becomes the arbiter of her own legacy: her own words set the tone, and her ilms communicate the fragility of the body and heighten the beauty and danger in its pliant gestures. “At its core, we ind a sustained engagement with what it means to be a human being living in this world,” Oransky stated of her ilmography. “Anyone who has ever asked themselves these kinds of questions will ind value and reward in the experience of her work.”

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LEFT: “Creek,”1974, Ana Mendieta Film Super-8.

B OT H I M AG E S: © T H E E S TAT E O F A N A M E N D I E TA C O L L E C T I O N , L LC . C O U R T E S Y GA L E R I E L E LO N G & C O.

BELOW: “Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece),” 1976, Ana Mendieta Film Super-8.

Mendieta, who was born in Havana in 1948, was sent to the United States in 1961 — via Operation Peter Pan, which exiled unaccompanied Cuban minors en masse — and would not return to her native terrain until 1980. The resulting sense of displacement colored her life and her artistic practice. The artist’s “Silueta Series,” consisting of multiple videos created between 1973-80 in Iowa and Mexico, is her most well-known. The set of ilms was initially exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery in New York City, the irst American venue created by women to redress their exclusion from the rampant sexism of the art world. Mendieta, like many artists of her time, was sidelined for spotlighting personal subjects that were visceral, bodily and intimate given the dominance of dispassionate minimal and conceptual art. She experimented tirelessly with form. Oransky cited Mendieta’s 1981 “Esculturas Rupestres” series as a prime example of the complexities of classifying her output any one way. The series included carvings she made in the limestone caves of Escaleras de Jaruco in Cuba, photographs she made of the carvings, an artist book of the photographs, ilm footage made of the carvings and an edited ilm

named after the series (which is on view at the Jeu de Paume). Mendieta’s grotto sculptures eventually eroded into oblivion; like many of her works, the ensemble lives on only through the artist’s ilms and photographs. At the time, executing the live work was seen as more meaningful; documenting it on ilm was deemed a mere necessity to capture the ephemeral. Oransky dismissed this as “similar to the hierarchy of placing the aesthetic over the functional” and, through this ilm-focused exhibition, wishes to give the medium its proper due in her practice. “Is the ilm documentation? Yes. Is it an artwork unto itself? Yes. Is it both, simultaneously? Yes.” “Terminology itself can be an impediment to our understanding,” he said. An artist’s creation is often more elaborate and elastic than the discourse around it: “Mendieta referred to herself as a sculptor. She utilized performance, photography and ilm in her work, but she resisted the labels of performance artist, photographer and ilmmaker. Perhaps she was suggesting a different paradigm for sculpture, and we haven’t caught up to it yet, a paradigm for sculpture which incorporated all these genres,” Oransky said. “Mendieta’s work is a

brilliant example of that disruptive engagement.” While she directly confronted the sexism and racism in the art world (and beyond) within the parameters of her work, Mendieta’s wider legacy has, more recently, been extrapolated as a symbolic vehicle to question the veneration of some male artists. In particular, exhibitions featuring Mendieta’s husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, have spurred furious activism. Andre was acquitted of charges related to Mendieta’s tragic death in 1985. Protesters at a 2017 exhibition of Andre’s in Los Angeles handed out postcards with Mendieta’s portrait and the probing question Dónde está Ana Mendieta? (Where is Ana Mendieta?) “I understand and I feel the same sense of grief, outrage and injustice that many people feel about her violent and premature death,” Oransky said. But he refuses to entangle Mendieta’s legacy with anyone else’s. “I am not interested in using Mendieta’s work as a comeuppance for Carl Andre, or for any other purpose,” he said, insisting only that “I am interested in sharing Mendieta’s work with others, so they can have the kind of deeply meaningful experiences that I have had with her work.” — SARAH MOROZ

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Giacometti, “Tête crâne,” 1934, plaster, 18.3 x 19.9 x 22.1 cm.

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Lately, Alberto Giacometti has been everywhere. Final Portrait, Stanley Tucci’s critically acclaimed biopic of the artist, continues its worldwide release this month. A major retrospective of the Swiss-born sculptor just closed at the Guggenheim in New York. In Paris, the Giacometti Foundation opened a new institute this summer: the irst ever space dedicated to the artist. While, most recently, the exhibition “Giacometti: Between Tradition and the Avant-Garde” opened at the Maillol Museum, also in the French capital, running through Jan. 20. While the focus on Giacometti is welcome, it’s disappointing how familiar much of it has felt. The Guggenheim show — while comprehensive, with over 170 works — was essentially a straightforward retrospective, with little attempt to offer

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creative interpretations or fresh presentations of his art or legacy. Tucci’s ilm, similarly, while earnestly acted — with Geoffrey Rush in the lead — scrimps on exploring signiicant untrodden ground. The show at Maillol, however, at least attempts to ind a new angle — primarily by showing Giacometti’s work alongside that of other sculptors of the period. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Giacometti Foundation and curated by Catherine Grenier, the foundation’s director, is much smaller in scale than the Guggenheim retrospective: it includes about 50 sculptures plus a variety of drawings and archival documents, all from the Giacometti Foundation’s collection. But Grenier has also included about 25 mostly sculptural works from other artists, including Rodin,

Alberto Giacometti, “L’Homme qui marche II (Walking Man II),” 1960, bronze, 72 x 37 x 8 1/2 in./183 x 94 x 22 cm.

B OT H I M AG E S: C O U R T E S Y S U C C E S S I O N A L B E R TO G I AC O M E T T I ( F O N DAT I O N G I AC O M E T T I , PA R I S + A DAG P, PA R I S ) 2 018

A fresh take on Giacometti at the Musée Maillol

P H OTO © J E A N - A L E X B R U N E L L E .

Aristide Maillol, “Les Trois Nymphes de la Prairie,” (1930-1937), bronze, 157 x 144 x 78 cm., Dina Vierny Foundation — Maillol Museum, Paris.

Brancusi, Bourdelle, Maillol (the museum’s namesake), Lipchitz, and Csaky, which she places in dialogue with Giacometti’s works in order to highlight his shifts in style and different sources of inspiration. Born in 1901 in the town of Borgonovo in Italianspeaking Switzerland, Giacometti moved to Paris when he was 21. A large part of “Between Tradition and the Avant Garde” is derived from these early years, notably his pre-World War I sculptures, which mainly lean toward a classical modernism similar to those of Maillol. By 1925, as he was becoming immersed in the Paris art scene, his sculptures became more avant-garde, inspired by his friends Lipchitz and Csaky. Then they, in turn, gave way to his almost Surrealist, highly abstract works, which Grenier invites the viewer to compare to the sculptures of Brancusi. It was around this time that Giacometti moved into his famously grungy studio in Montparnasse. Tiny, with a leaky roof, little light and no running water, Giacometti nevertheless felt at home there, continuing to work there for 40 years even as his fame grew and he could afford somewhere nicer. “The longer I stayed, the bigger it became,” he said. “I could it anything I wanted into it.” The studio is depicted in the Maillol exhibition through a variety of images taken by photographers and friends of Giacometti, who would regularly drop by, including Brassai, Denise Colomb, Herbert Matter, and Sabine Weiss. (The studio is fully recreated

as an installation at the Giacometti Institute.) The year 1926 was a particularly vital one for Giacometti: it was then that he created his innovative “Spoon Woman,” drawing on West African art to create a totemic woman with an oval belly and boxy head, which propelled him fully into his avant-garde period. Almost a decade later, in 1935, he moved toward a more philosophical, existential form of art — creating more igurative works that reflect the style of Rodin and Bourdelle. When World War II broke out, his sculptures literally shrank. Between 1938 and 1944, the

tallest sculpture he created was a mere two-and-threequarter inches high. “Wanting to create from memory what I had seen,” he said, “to my terror the sculptures became smaller and smaller.” And yet, after the war, he began creating his tallest — and most famous — sculptures: those tall, impossibly slender male and female igures. His stylistic evolution more or less stopped here, and the Maillol exhibition plays up this long igurative period, with an emphasis on his mid-century works “La Clairiere” (1950), “Woman of Venice III” (1956), and “Walking Man II” (1960). It’s intriguing to wonder why Giacometti ultimately settled on igurative work, after such long spells in avant-gardism, abstractionism, and surrealism: after drawing inspiration from Brancusi and Picasso, he returned to the kind of traditional art he had been taught in Paris in his early twenties. Perhaps, in a sense, his greatest talent lay in redeining what traditionalism fundamentally means: a minute attention to form. “I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality,” he once said, “to protect myself.” Despite having lived through two world wars, toward the end of his life, Giacometti insisted it was the everyday world — not abstractionism — that most interested him. “Only reality interests me now,” he said. “I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.” — CODY DELISTRATY

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Ron Amir, “Bisharah and Anwar’s Tree (L’arbre de Bisharah et Anwar),” 2015.

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“Somewhere in the Desert,” Ron Amir, City of Paris Museum of Modern Art

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Ron Amir, “Abdelrazik’s Bench (Le banc d’Abdelrazik),” 2014.

B OT H I M AG E S : © R O N A M I R

In “Hamed Alnil’s Bench,” a photograph taken by Ron Amir at the Holot Facility, a refugee camp in Israel that closed earlier this year, there are no humans visible. A long, thin piece of metal rests beneath a sparse, green tree in a desertlike surrounding. It may belong to Alnil — one of thousands of Africans who passed into Israel as asylum seekers via Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — but he is nowhere to be seen. Amir, an Israeli photographer who is known for his work with people living on society’s margins, visited the controversial, now-shuttered facility on numerous occasions between 2014 and 2016, photographing the center and its residents. The asylum seekers were men from Sudan and Eritrea, and, detained at the Israeli border, they had been sent to Holot in the unforgiving Negev Desert. Technically, they could come and go from the facility as they pleased, but they were required to check in and out with guards, forbidden to work, and were given few resources on which to live. For Alnil, his bench was a rare piece of property. In another photograph taken by Amir, a shared oven is pictured alone outside; in another, stones are arranged on the ground as a way to carve out a space to be used as a mosque. In another, empty water bottles are pushed into the desert ground — the reason neither explained nor implied. Through Amir’s photographs, one sees Holot’s oppressive barrenness but also, like dandelions through concrete, the life that

Ron Amir, “Untitled (line),” 2015.

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Ron Amir, “Stall (closed), 2014.

nonetheless managed to flourish. Thirty large-scale photographs like these, along with six videos, compose “Somewhere in the Desert,” Amir’s exhibition that is on show at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art until December 2. Curated by Noam Gal, a professor of art history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art’s photography curator, a version of this exhibition was shown at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2016, where it shocked many viewers who either didn’t know about Holot or hadn’t realized the desperate lack of provisions for refugees there. But while Amir’s intention was largely to make public the conditions there, it was also to show the human capacity for creating communities and a sense of home. Amir wanted to “open another channel of observation that enables developing broader connotations on these sites,” he said at the exhibition’s opening at the Israel Museum. Amir did not simply snap his photographs and leave. Rather, by making friends with many of the refugees, he imbricated himself within their attempts to create a sense of

togetherness. The six videos in the exhibition are especially a testament to this. “In Ron’s videos, nothing happens,” Gal said at the opening. “That’s just the point — you can see what’s happening at Holot only if you take [it] upon yourself to sit and kill time from your day, and understand that what happens to the people there is the same time as yours.” Last November, the Israeli government inally decided to close the facility, perhaps partly in response to the exhibition, and, in March, the last remaining asylum seekers walked out its doors. Holot had been a BandAid solution, created as a way for the Israeli government to handle the roughly 42,000 refugees who had come in from Africa, especially as vocal members of the country’s political right believed that the mostly Muslim (and some Christian) refugees were “poisoning” Israel’s Jewish culture. A group of international human rights organizations had written a joint letter to the Israeli government castigating the project. “Holot was an unnecessary and expensive jail whose declared purpose was to make the refugees’ lives miserable, to pressure them to give up their right to asylum and leave

Israel,” they wrote. “This was an embarrassing display of pride by the state and the abuse of human life.” Even now, those who were released from Holot and are still allowed to apply for asylum are banned from living or working in most of Israel’s major cities. Amir’s photographs show what was going on behind all of this political maneuvering — how thousands of men were being exploited and moved like political pawns. It is particularly appropriate that “Somewhere in the Desert” is now being shown in Paris, given France’s struggle with migrants. Although President Emmanuel Macron has proven relatively open to taking in migrants, in a recent Ifob poll, 54 percent of French voters said they do not want France to offer safe harbor to any more migrant ships. What must be taken from the exhibition is Amir’s simple demonstration of the refugees’ humanity, amongst the desperate sociopolitical turmoil they face. To have a bench of one’s own is a simple act worth remembering, worth photographing. A place to sit, beneath a tree. A rare bit of shade in a merciless desert. — CODY DELISTRATY

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ABOVE: Dior (Maria Grazia Chiuri), Spring / summer 2017, ready-towear, and spring / summer 2017 haute couture, Petrovsky & Ramone (photo), Maarten Spruyt (art direction) for Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

T H E H AG U E

From the outside, the fashion industry seems to be a world of women, but in fact it has taken a long time for women designers to become recognized for their work, let alone honored for their pioneering designs. The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague has organized what they say is the very irst exhibition to focus entirely on female fashion designers: “Femmes Fatales, Strong Women in Fashion,” from November 17 to March 24, 2019. The retrospective, which begins in the 18th century and ends with contemporary designs fresh from the runway, spans 15 galleries within the museum and includes more than 100 pieces. It naturally includes some household names such as Coco Chanel, Vivienne Westwood and Miuccia Prada, as well as lesser-known designers such as Jeanne Lanvin and Mary Quant, with a focus on the Dutch designers Iris van Herpen and

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R I G H T: C O U R T E S Y D I O R , L E F T: C O U R T E S Y M A R Y K AT R A N T ZO U

“Femmes Fatales: Strong Women in Fashion” at the Gemeentemuseum

Mary Katrantzou, collection summer 2018, Petrovsky & Ramone (photo), Maarten Spruyt (art direction) for Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

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Vivienne Westwood, autumn/winter 2018, Petrovsky & Ramone (photo), Maarten Spruyt (art direction), for Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

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Fong Leng. The exhibition was conceived in 2016, before the advent of the #MeToo movement, said the curator Madelief Hohé, when Maria Grazia Chiuri became the irst female artistic director of Dior, and turned the design house’s catwalk into “a platform for an ongoing conversation about feminism and the arts,” according to Vogue. “We thought, we should focus on the history of women in design,” Hohé said in an interview. But when #MeToo broke in the autumn of 2017, that propelled, and inspired, the exhibition’s planning, said Hohé. “We were quite lucky that we had good timing, because after that, with the #MeToo movement, and the speech of Oprah Winfrey and all these other developments, we said we have to really

C O U R T E S Y V I V I E N N E W E S T W O O D, R I G H T: C O U R T E S Y S T E L L A M C C A R T N E Y

ABOVE: Stella McCartney, Petrovsky & Ramone (photo), Maarten Spruyt (art direction), for Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

TO P : P H OTO : G E O R G E H OY N I N G E N - H U E N E . G E T T Y I M AG E S / G E O R G E H OY N I N G E N - H U E N E / G E M E E N T E M U S E U M T H E H AG U E . B OT TO M : P H OTO : P E T R OV S K Y & R A M O N E F O R G E M E E N T E M U S E U M D E N H A AG

Elsa Schiaparelli, 1932.

hurry now because it looks like we’re just doing it in response,” she said. “Femmes Fatales” will emphasize the political and emancipatory role of fashion throughout history. It begins in the 18th century when the fashion industry was strictly divided: women who made clothes were “seamstresses” while men were “tailors,” and when a woman tried to move into a more creative design or leadership role she often remained a “seamstress,” while men in the same positions were dubbed “master couturiers.” The early 20th-century French master couturier Paul Poiret, for example, diminished one of his major competitors, Coco Chanel, by describing her as “that little seamstress,” according to Hohé. Of course times change, and many women entered the fashion business and rose to its top ranks, but Hohé said that there is still just as much discrimination, harassment and as great an income disparity between genders in fashion today as there is in any other industry. The exhibition will explore how women designers have not only changed the way clothes could be made to it women’s bodies better, but also how some female fashion designers attempted to break down barriers for women. In the 1970s, for examples, Rei Kawakubo named her Japanese fashion label Comme des Garçons, which translates as, “like the boys.” She describes her playful, radical designs as “clothes for a woman who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.” Diane von Furstenberg’s simple 1974 “wrap dress” was a revolution in fashion, because it was designed with a hard-working woman in mind — one who wanted to dress quickly, travel easily and have her body flattered, no matter what her shape. In her irst collection for Dior, Chiuri printed “We Should All Be Feminists” on a

Iris van Herpen, “Wilderness Embodied,” Courtesy: Iris van Herpen.

T-shirt for her Spring 2017 collection, taken from the title of a booklength essay by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A year later, she sent models down the runway in another provocative T-shirt: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” the title of the late feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s seminal 1971 essay. So why is the exhibition called “Femmes Fatales,” which references seductive women who often used nefarious means to get what they want, and lead men to their own destruction? “It’s kind of a playful title,” said Hohé. “What these women did was quite a powerful thing to do,” and it posed a threat to the established gender order. “The fact that we ind it special that there are now so many female designers — I think that says enough.” — NINA SIEGAL

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DATEBOOK Not-to-be-missed shows this month N EW YO R K

Yasumasa Morimura’s “In the Room of Art History” at Luhring Augustine

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making stems from a desire to step into and inhabit pictorial space. He makes use of props, makeup, costumes and digital manipulation to embody the personas of prominent igures in history, art and entertainment as they are represented in popular visual culture. “Concurrent with Luhring Augustine’s exhibition, Japan Society will present ‘Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura’ in New York. Curated by Japan Society Gallery Director Yukie Kamiya, the exhibition showcases Morimura’s signature photographic self-portraits and features the US premieres of two of his newest works: his irst feature-length video piece, ‘Egó Sympósion,’ and ‘Egó Obscura,’ a multimedia cinematic installation,” the gallery adds. Morimura, born in Osaka in 1951, has had recent solo exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and the National Museum of Modern Art in Osaka. www.luhringaugustine.com

Yasumasa Morimura, “Self-Portraits through Art History (Van Gogh’s Room),” 2016, color photograph, 57 x 86 in. (145 x 218.5 cm.).

Yasumasa Morimura, “One Hundred M’s self-portraits,” 1993-2000, 1 from a series of 100, gelatin silver prints, each: 17 3/4 x 14 in. (45.09 x 35.56 cm.).

B OT H I M AG E S: P H OTO BY FA R Z A D O W R A N G

The exhibition features two bodies of Morimura’s work: “SelfPortraits through Art History” (2016), in which the artist derives his imagery from iconic masterpieces by Caravaggio, Vermeer, Magritte and van Gogh; and his seminal “One Hundred M’s self-portraits” (1993-2000), where he emulates celebrities such as Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot. The exhibition is on view through November 17. “In ‘Self-Portraits through Art History,’ Morimura animates the paintings by expanding the frame, often inviting the viewer to witness a quiet moment just before or after the original scene,” the gallery writes. “Similarly, in ‘One Hundred M’s self-portraits,’ through employing close up glamour shots Morimura draws the viewer into an imagined private sphere, where they shift between the roles of admirer, voyeur, and welcome friend.” Famous for challenging the conventions of self-portraiture, Morimura’s approach to image-

Wendell Castle (American, 1932-2018), “Hopeful Morning,” 2015, stained ash, 57.5 x 54 x 79.5 in./ 146.1 x 137.2 x 201.9 cm.

Byung Hoon Choi (Korean, b. 1952), “afterimage of beginning 016-472,” 2016, basalt, 25.25 x 51.25 x 31.5 in./ 64 x 130 x 80 cm.

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A L L I M AG E S: C O U R T E S Y F R I E D M A N B E N DA , N E W YO R K-

“Under the Night Sky” at Friedman Benda Albertz benda & Friedman Benda host a group show “Under the Night Sky,” on view through December 15. The exhibition explores the numerous ways in which the frontier of the night sky influences the human psyche and continues to hold artists in its grip. Curated by the New York-based private dealer and collector Michael Black, the exhibition brings together signiicant works by modern, postwar, and contemporary artists and designers. “The works in the exhibition engage with the night sky on both conscious and unconscious levels, featuring the interplay between literal homages to the night sky and works with looser interpretations of the theme, whose makers innately channel the emotive presence of night,”

writes the gallery. The focal point of this exhibition is a rare collection of 19thcentury Baluch and related tribes’ Mina Khani rugs. Palettes of midnight blues, coral and cherry reds and emerald greens are often punctuated by white floral and geometric motifs, which symbolize prosperity and fertility. These textiles evoke the visual effect of luminescent stars in the night sky. On view at Friedman Benda are works by Wendell Castle, Byung Hoon Choi, Andile Dyalvane and Misha Kahn, among others. Participating artists at albertz benda include Georg Baselitz, Billy Al Bengston, Ralph Albert Blakelock, Peter Doig, Piero Dorazio and Nan Goldin, among others. www.friedmanbenda.com

Ralph Albert Blakelock, (American, 1847 -1919), “Silvery Moon,” oil on canvas, laid down on board, 18 3/16 x 24 in./ 46 x 61 cm., framed dimensions: 30 7/8 x 36 1/2 in. / 78.5 x 92.5 cm.

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Edward Burtynsky, “Imperial Valley #5, Holtville, California, USA,” 2009.

OTTAWA

The National Gallery of Canada exhibits “Anthropocene,” a multidisciplinary exhibition at its Ottawa venue featuring works of the artists Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier. The exhibition is on view through February 24. This major new Contemporary art exhibition features the works of the worldrenowned photographer Burtynsky and multiple award-winning ilmmakers Baichwal and de Pencier. “Proposed as a new geological epoch, the ‘Anthropocene’ is deined by the permanent impact of human activities on the Earth such as terraforming through mining, urbanization and agriculture; human-caused extinction and biodiversity loss, and the global presence of materials such as plastics and concrete,” the gallery says. This exhibition unites ilm, photography, augmented reality (AR) installations and scientiic research. Photographs and visitoractivated ilms “encourage a collaborative exploration of subjects inviting viewers to experience and reflect on the pervasive and complex repercussions of our modern way of life on the present and future state of our planet,” the gallery says. www.gallery.ca

ABOVE: Edward Burtynsky, “Salt Pan #21, Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India,” 2016. Edward Burtynsky, “Cerro Dominador Solar Project #1, Atacama Desert, Chile,” 2017.

Edward Burtynsky, “Uralkali Potash Mine #2, Berezniki, Russia,” 2017.

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A L L I M AG E S : © E D WA R D B U R T Y N S K Y, C O U R T E S Y H O WA R D G R E E N B E R G A N D B R YC E W O L KO W I T Z GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K / N I C H O L A S M E T I V I E R GA L L E R Y, TO R O N TO

“Anthropocene” at National Gallery of Canada

Kesang Lamdark, “H. H. in da House,” 2018, glass mirror, LED lights and wood, 70 x 200 x 8 cm. (27 ½ x 78 ¾ x 3 ¼ in.).

H O N G KO N G

B OT H I M AG E S : C O U R T E S Y O F R O S S I & R O S S I A N D T H E A R T I S T

Kesang Lamdark’s “Knock, Knock” at Rossi & Rossi Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong, is featuring Kesang Lamdark’s “Knock, Knock,” on view through November 24. The exhibition explores the transformation of the artist’s spiritual homeland, juxtaposing imagery from classical Tibetan art with that found in an imported Chinese consumer culture. The gallery reveals that the show’s title derives from the repetitive sound the artist makes as he hammers tiny holes to create micro-pointillist lightboxes and aluminum-can sculptures. Describing his process, Lamdark says, “The knock knock is the drumbeat, the heartbeat — meditation…similar to the sounds of monks making a sand mandala. I’m making a light mandala, releasing with my needles, light to go through.” “Superheroes” (2018) combines images of ancient heroes with Tibetan deities and Marvel Comic

igures. “Modern superheroes remind me somehow of all the [gods and] goddesses in Tibet, who are like superheroes for me,” Lamdark says. The gallery says, “He explores and embraces the differences between the two cultures, offering new perspectives on the deities of Tibet, superheroes of the West and the occupation and commercialization of his birthplace.” For his work “Drunk Driving in Lhasa” (2017), Lamdark mounts Lhasa Beer cans on a cracked car windscreen, which is surrounded by disco lights, producing the effect of a ire burning inside. Hammered into the bottoms of the cans are micropointillist images of Tibetan holy men, along with The Blues Brothers, a car crash and a woman performing fellatio. “Sex and death are closely related,” Lamdark says. www.rossirossi.com

Kesang Lamdark, “Milky Way,” 2018, 75 perforated beer cans on lightbox, 61 x 61 x 30 cm. (24 x 24 x 12 in.).

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BERLIN

On view through November 17, the exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake lends its title from Alexander von Humboldt’s depiction and holistic categorization of a mountain and its surroundings developed during his explorations in Latin America. “On entering the exhibition, the visitor becomes part of a semiotic hyper-landscape, replete with references, tropes and symbols. Paul Fägerskiöld describes the elements of these paintings as pieces of shadows — hieroglyphs from Plato’s cave, in which the viewer is like Lucy, the irst known human, building up meaning and language through images,” the gallery says. According to the gallery, “My Life in the Woods (after Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert),” the largest painting suite reinterprets by Bellini’s celebrated Renaissance painting while also alluding to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” and constitutes a non-linear narrative depiction of the “real” world surrounding the artist. “Sarah’s Dream” references the apocalyptic fears of Sarah Connor in the movie “Terminator 2” in a Dada-esque apparition; “Naledi” depicts 12 stars in a circle on the thick and textured black surface of the painting. “Previously in his paintings, Fägerskiöld has eschewed igurative elements and each painting has only depicted a single subject. This new suite of monochrome large-scale works is full of interrelationships that build webs of meanings, stories and landscapes,” the gallery says. www.nordenhake.com

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ABOVE: Paul Fägerskiöld, “My Life In The Woods (After Bellini’s St. Francis In The Desert),” 2018, oil on canvas, each 97 x 97 cm., overall dimension: 297 x 397 cm.

Paul Fägerskiöld, “Naledi,” 2018, oil on canvas, 252 x 307 cm.

B OT H I M AG E S : C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D GA L E R I E N O R D E N H A K E B E R L I N / S TO C K H O L M ; P H OTO : G E R H A R D K A S S N E R

Paul Fägerskiöld’s “Naturgemälde” at Galerie Nordenhake

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Finding Winnie-the-Pooh at the Museum of Fine Arts

Ernest Howard Shepard, “For a long time they looked at the river beneath them,” House at Pooh Corner chapter 6, 1928, pencil on paper, collection of James DuBose.

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Ernest Howard Shepard, “Pooh and Piglet go hunting,” Winnie-thePooh chapter 3, 1926, pen and ink, from the collection of Clive and Alison Beecham.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is hosting a multi-sensory exhibition that traces the history behind the beloved teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, who irst appeared in 1926 in the book by A.A. Milne, illustrated by E.H. Shepard. On view through January 6, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic,” showcases around 200 works drawn from the archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Walt Disney Company, the Shepard Trust, and private collections. It includes original drawings, proofs, letters, photographs, cartoons, ceramics and clothes. Highlights encompass the irst Winnie-thePooh character portraits drawn by Shepard; replicas of stuffed animals belonging to Christopher Milne, the inspiration for the character “Christopher Robin”; original sketches of the “Hundred Acre Wood”; plush toys from 1930s; a Lego set; a print from the Winnie-thePooh satire “Wookie the Chew”; and a handwritten letter from Milne to Shepard from 1926. “The exhibition explores the thrilling interplay between text and illustration, shedding new light on the creative collaboration between Milne and Shepard,” the museum stated. www.mfa.org

TO P I M AG E: © 1970 A N D 1973 , BY E R N E S T H . S H E PA R D A N D E G M O N T U K L I M I T E D. C O U R T E S Y M U S E U M O F F I N E A R T S , B O S TO N . B OT TO M L E F T & R I G H T: © T H E S H E PA R D T R U S T, I M AG E C O U R T E S Y O F T H E V I C TO R I A A N D A L B E R T M U S E U M , LO N D O N . C O U R T E S Y M U S E U M O F F I N E A R T S , B O S TO N

Ernest Howard Shepard (British, 1879–1976), “Pooh sitting on his branch … beside him, ten pots of honey,” 1970, line block, and watercolor, hand-colored.

George Shaw, “Scenes from The Passion: The Path to Pepys Corner,” 2001, Humbrol enamel on board, Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum, Worcester.

CO N N ECT I C U T

B OT H I M AG E S: C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D T H E A N T H O N Y W I L K I N S O N GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N , © G E O R G E S H AW 2 018

George Shaw at the Yale Center for British Art

George Shaw, “The Land of Nod Drawing: Pop Quiz,”1999.

The Yale Center for British Art has dedicated a solo show to the contemporary British artist George Shaw (born 1966). The exhibition, on view through December 30, includes around 70 paintings, 60 drawings, and numerous prints and sketchbook materials. Shaw’s work focuses on the Midlands, the central British region set around the cities of Birmingham, Derby, and Coventry. Steeped in ine art tradition, his work alludes to 20th-century artists, as well as historic European Masters. “His Realist landscapes of the housing estates and woodlands of his youth pay homage to the Old Masters who have shaped his vision, but simultaneously subvert our ideas about landscape by uncovering the realities of postmodern Britain,” said Matthew Hargraves, Chief Curator of Art Collections at the YCBA. The exhibition is organized thematically, with eight loosely chronological sections. A series of short ilms by the British ilmmakers Lily Ford, Jonathan Law, and Jared Schiller explore different aspects of Shaw’s life and creative output. britishart.yale.edu

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Lynne Gelfman, “lines pink 5,” 2007, acrylic on panel, 48 x 48 in., collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Lisa Austin and Jim Hofford.

MIAMI

“Grids” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami With “Grids,” the Pérez Art Museum Miami turns its focus to Lynne Golob Gelfman (born 1944), exploring her work in relation to the Modernist tradition of the grid. The exhibition, on view through April 21, focuses on paintings produced over the last two decades, but also includes earlier works dating from 1968 and 1972 — the year she moved to Miami from New York. It encompasses ive different series, including “oil and sand,” in which Gelfman references the metalwork seen in many working-class

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Miami neighborhoods to secure windows and gates. In “line,” she investigates indigenous weaving techniques, while “thru” depicts repeating triangles and squares. “Gelfman’s early training involved exposure to lateModernist Abstraction’s emphasis on nonrepresentational forms,” the museum writes. “References to grids served as one extreme example of these interests, as seen in the work of early Modernists such as Piet Mondrian or Kazimir Malevich.” www.pamm.org

Lynne Gelfman, “burqa grey,” 2000, acrylic on canvas, 66 x 96 in.

TO P L E F T& B OT TO M R I G H T: © LY N N E G O LO B G E L F M A N . I M AG E C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, TO P R I G H T: © LY N N E G O LO B G E L F M A N . P H OTO : O R I O L TA R R I DA S

Lynne Gelfman, “thru 8.3,” 2017, acrylic on linen, 48 x 48 in.

Richard Pettibone, “My First Duchamp Bicycle Wheel,” 1965, oil on canvas, 10 1/4 x 6 3/4 in./ 26 x 17.1 cm.

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A L L I M AG E S: C O U R T E S Y C A S T E L L I GA L L E R Y

Richard Pettibone at Castelli Gallery The Castelli Gallery in New York is showcasing three new series by the American artist Richard Pettibone (born 1938), on view through November 21. For his most recent series, Pettibone reproduced Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Fluttering Heart” cover for the 1936 “Cahiers D’Art” magazine. In 2016, Pettibone suffered a heart attack and the act of recreating Duchamp’s concentric design by hand “not only served as a therapeutic process, but also provided a tangible means of connecting the seemingly contradictory realities of Duchamp’s playful image and the gravity of

Pettibone’s own condition,” the gallery states. The second series focuses on Shaker furniture, a subject that has fascinated the artist since the late 1980s when he moved to New York, and includes paintings of a Shaker chair in the artist’s signature photorealist style. For the third series, Pettibone revisits his own 1965 appropriation of Marcel Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel.” One of the major themes running through the exhibition is the idea that although an object itself may remain the same, its value — whether emotional, conceptual, or inancial — evolves over time. www.castelligallery.com

Richard Pettibone, “Shaker Chair #2,” 2018, oil on canvas, 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in./ 19.4 x 24.4 cm.

LEFT: Richard Pettibone, “Marcel Duchamp, ‘Fluttering Hearts’, Paris, 1936, #6,” 2016, oil on canvas, 10 1/4 x 7 3/4 in./ 26 x 19.7 cm.

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Cate Blanchett, in a still from the film “Manifesto” by Julian Rosefeldt. LOS A N G E L ES

Cate Blanchett, in a still from the film “Manifesto” by Julian Rosefeldt.

Cate Blanchett, in a still from the film “Manifesto” by Julian Rosefeldt.

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Hauser & Wirth is presenting Julian Rosefeldt’s “Manifesto” through January 6 at its Los Angeles gallery. In the ilm, the actress Cate Blanchett portrays 13 different characters — including a factory worker, a television news anchor, and a homeless man — while performing various artistic and political manifestos. The words, actions, and settings can sometimes appear at odds, adding an ambiguity to the ilm. “The work pays homage to the long tradition and literary beauty of public statements made by artists, and serves to provoke reflection upon the artist’s role as an active citizen in society today,” the gallery says.“Manifesto” draws upon the writings of Futurists, Dadaists, Suprematists, Situationists, Dogme 95, and other groups. Julian Rosefeldt (born 1965) is a German artist and ilmmaker. He studied architecture in Munich and Barcelona and has taught at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Faculty of Media Art. He is a professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, since 2011. www.hauserwirth.com

A L L I M AG E S : © J U L I A N R O S E F E L DT A N D VG B I L D - K U N S T, B O N N 2 018

Julian Rosefeldt’s “Manifesto” at Hauser & Wirth

Jeffery Keedy, “Calendar for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE),” December 1988/January 1989, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Decorative Arts and Design Council Acquisition Fund.

Frances Butler, “John Beach talks about Design History,” 1981, letterpress, enamel spray paint, 23 × 16 5/8 in., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Treib Collection.

TO P L E F T: © J E F F E R Y K E E DY, P H OTO © M U S E U M A S S O C I AT ES/L AC M A , TO P R I G H T: © F R A N C E S B U T L E R , P H OTO © M U S E U M A S S O C I AT E S/ L AC M A . B OT TO M : © E M I G R E , I N C ., P H OTO © M U S E U M A S S O C I AT E S/ L AC M A

LOS A N G E L ES

Graphic Design on Show at LACMA The late 20th century was a transformational moment for graphic design, as artists began to press for greater autonomy and to challenge the rigid rules of Modernism. Many avant-garde artists chose to quit the established New York design world and head to California. “West of Modernism: California Graphic Design, 19751995,” on view through April 21, is part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Graphic Design Initiative”: an

inter-departmental project initiated in 2014 by the Decorative Arts & Design and the Prints & Drawings departments at LACMA, in order to build up a strong permanent collection of graphic design works. Works in the show are drawn from this new collection, and include influential designers like Emigre, Inc., Ed Fella, April Greiman, Rebeca Méndez, Deborah Sussman, and Lorraine Wild. www.lacma.org

Emigre Inc., Rudy VanderLans, “Non-Stop Design,” 1989, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Decorative Arts and Design Deaccession Fund and the Prints and Drawings Council Fund.

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LEFT: Jungjin Lee, “Opening #13,” 2016, archival pigment print on Korean Mulberry Paper. MIDDLE: Jungjin Lee, “Opening #02,” 2015, archival pigment print on Korean Mulberry Paper. RIGHT: Jungjin Lee, “Opening #15,” 2016, archival pigment print on Korean Mulberry Paper.

RIGHT: Jungjin Lee, “Opening #04,” 2016, archival pigment print on Korean Mulberry.

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MODERN PAINTERS NOVEMBER 2018 BLOUINARTINFO.COM

N EW YO R K

Jungjin Lee’s “Opening” at the Howard Greenberg Gallery The Howard Greenberg Gallery is showcasing “Opening,” featuring photographs by the Korean artist Jungjin Lee, through November 10. The captivating primal landscapes reflect Lee’s travels in Arizona, New Mexico, and Canada, and her fascination with deserts and mountains. The large format photographs, printed on Korean mulberry paper, bring a weight and physical presence to the show. “Many of the images are narrow verticals, reminiscent of the shape of hanging scrolls, which hint at Eastern philosophies and the pursuit of inner peace,” the gallery said. Lee, whose interest in photography began while she was studying ceramics at Hongik University in Seoul, later graduated with an MFA in photography from New York University, and was an assistant to Robert Frank. “I don’t portray landscapes or nature,” says Lee (born 1961). “The desert makes me see my inner self clearly.” Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Korea. www.howardgreenberg.com

A L L I M AG E S : © J U N G J I N L E E , C O U R T E S Y H O WA R D G R E E N B E R G GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K

LEFT: Jungjin Lee, “Opening #10,” 2016, archival pigment print on Korean Mulberry Paper.

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GALLERY LISTINGS Acquavella Galleries

David Nolan Gallery

18 E 79th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 734 6300 [email protected] acquavellagalleries.com James Rosenquist: “His American Life,” October 25-December 7

527 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 925 6190 [email protected] davidnolangallery.com “Drawing Space: 1970-1983,” Darboven, Le Va, Rockburne, Sandback, Saret, Sonnier, November 1-December 21

Casey Kaplan 121 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 645 7335 [email protected] caseykaplangallery.com Geoffrey Farmer: “Mudpuddlers, Corn Borders, Polymorphic Platyforms,” November 1December 22

Di Donna 744 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10065 +1 212 259 0444 [email protected] didonna.com Surrealist, Post-War and Modern Art

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art Cheim & Read 547 W 25th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 242 7727 [email protected] cheimread.com Joan Mitchell: “Paintings from the Middle of Last Century, 1953-1962,” extended through November 3 Louise Bourgeois: “Spiral,” November 8-December 22

37 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019 +1 212 517 2453 [email protected] edwardtylernahemfineart.com Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Masters

Edwynn Houk Gallery 745 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10151 +1 212 750 7070 [email protected] houkgallery.com Abelardo Morell: “Flowers for Lisa Part II,” November 1-December 22

Galerie Buchholz Fasanenstraße 30, 10719 Berlin +49 30 88 62 40 56 [email protected] galeriebuchholz.de Nairy Baghramian: Refreshed Showcase, October 24-November 17 Isa Genzken: Models for Outdoor Projects, November 27-January 19 Thomas Eggerer, November 27January 19 LOUISE BOURGEOIS Untitled, 1969, pencil and crayon on paper, 12 x 9 inches on view at Cheim & Read, © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY

DAVID LACHAPELLE A New World, 2017, chromogenic print, 15.6 X 24 inches at Galerie Daniel Templon Grenier Saint Lazare

Galerie Daniel Templon

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

30 rue Beaubourg 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare 75003 Paris +33 142 72 14 10 [email protected] danieltemplon.com David LaChapelle: “Letter to the World,” November 3-December 22 Atul Dodiya: “The Fragrance of a Paper Rose,” October 27December 22

Schöneberger Ufer 61, 10785 Berlin +49 30 26 39 49 85 [email protected] bortolozzi.com

Galerie Eigen + Art Auguststraße 26, 10117 Berlin +49 30 280 6605 [email protected] eigen-art.com Nicola Samorì, October 18 November 17 Jörg Herold, November 22December 20

Galerie Greta Meert 13 Rue du Canal, 1000 Brussels +32 2 219 14 22 galeriegretameert.com Gerard Byrne: “A film inside an image & some related works,” November 9-January 19

Galerie Hans Mayer Grabbeplatz 2, 40213 Düsseldorf +49 211 132 135 [email protected] galeriehansmayer.de

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff 78 Rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris +33 1 42 03 05 65 galeriewolff.com Franz Erhard Walther, October 1December 31

Galerie Karsten Greve 5, rue Delelleyme, 75003 Paris +33 1 42 77 19 37 [email protected] galerie-karsten-greve.com Lucia Laguna: “No bird or insect, leaf, bubble, and twig ... Nothing escapes the trap of gaze,” October 13-December 15

Galerie Krinzinger Seilerstätte 16, 1010 Vienna +43 1 5133006 [email protected] galerie-krinzinger.at Erik Schmidt: “Further Up & Further In,” October 12-November 10, curated by Juliane Bischoff Joris Van de Moortel: “One Person’s Music Is Another’s Noise,” October 12-November 10

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Galerie Lelong & Co.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia

Luhring Augustine

528 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 315 0470 [email protected] galerielelong.com Hélio Oiticica: “Spatial Relief and Drawings, 1955-59,” solo exhibition of the artist’s early gouache drawings and and an example of his signature Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief), November 3-December 22

3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, 18 rue du Bourg-Tibourg, 75004 Paris +33 1 42 74 67 68 nathalieobadia.com Nú Barreto: “Africa: Reversing, Upside Down” at Cloister SaintMerri, November 8-December 29 Wang Keping: “Carved Sculptures” at Bourg-Tibourg, November 9December 29

531 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 206 9100 [email protected] luhringaugustine.com Zarina, October 27-December 22

Galerie Lahumière

Galerie Nordenhake

17, rue du Parc Royal, 75003 Paris +33 1 42 77 27 74 [email protected] lahumiere.com Jean Gorin Today, October 13December 21

Lindenstrasse 34, 10969 Berlin +49 30 20 61 48 3 [email protected] nordenhake.com Paul Fägerskiold: A series of new individual and multi-panel works, all produced in 2018, September 14November 17 John Zurier, November 23-January 12

Galerie Martin Janda Eschenbachgasse 11, 1010 Vienna +43 1 5857371 [email protected] martinjanda.at Asier Mendizabal: “Process and Coincidence,” October 24December 1

Galleria Continua #8503, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road Chaoyang District 100015 Beijing, China +86 10 5978 9505 [email protected] galleriacontinua.com

Galerie Max Hetzler Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin Goethestraße 2/3, Berlin +49 30 34 64 97 850 [email protected] maxhetzler.com Charles Gaines at Bleibtreustraße 45, November 9-December 22 “TALK: True Stories, a Show Related to an Era - The Eighties,” at Goethestraße 2/3, opens November 15

Gladstone Gallery 515 W 24th St 530 W 21st St 130 E 64th St New York, NY +1 212 206 9300 [email protected] gladstonegallery.com Ugo Rondinone: “drifting clouds,” at 21st Street, September 22November 3

Galerie Nagel Draxler Weydingerstraße 2-4, 10178 Berlin +49 30 40 04 26 41 [email protected] nagel-draxler.de Kalin Lindena: “Novem Berism,” opens November 3

To be included in Modern Painters’ Gallery listings, contact [email protected]

Hauser & Wirth 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET +44 207 287 2300 [email protected] hauserwirth.com Zeng Fanzhi: “In the Studio,” October 2-November 10 Zoe Leonard, November 30February 9

Marian Goodman Gallery 24 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019 +1 212 977 7160 [email protected] mariangoodman.com Gabriel Orozco, extended through November 3 Amar Kanwar, November 14December 32

Marianne Boesky Gallery

JUNGJIN LEE Opening #15, 2016, archival pigment print on Korean Mulberry Paper, 57 x 30 inches at Howard Greenberg Gallery

509 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 680 9889 [email protected] marianneboeskygallery.com Svenja Deininger: “Crescendo,” through December 22

Matthew Marks Gallery Howard Greenberg Gallery 41 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022 +1 212 334 0010 [email protected] howardgreenberg.com Jungjin Lee: “Opening” and “The New Beginning for Italian Photography: 1945-1965,” through November 10 Edward Burtynsky: “Anthropocene” and Vivian Maier: “The Color Work,” November 14- January 5

523 W 24th St, 522 W 22nd St, 526 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10001 212-243-0200 [email protected] matthewmarks.com Ken Price at 523 W 24th Street, November 3-December 22 Ellsworth Kelly: “Color Panels for a Large Wall,” at 522 W 22nd Street, November 3-December 22

Metro Pictures Lehmann Maupin 501 W 24th St, 536 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 255 2923 [email protected] lehmannmaupin.com Catherine Opie at 24th Street, November 1-January 12 Mandy El-Sayegh at 22nd Street, November 8-December 22

519 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 206 7100 [email protected] metropictures.com Nina Beier: “Baby,” a selection of new sculptural work by this Berlinbased artist in her second exhibition at the gallery, October 26December 21

ENRICO DAVID Untitled (Dancers), 2018, wool on cotton, 74 x 117 inches at Michael Werner

Sadie Coles HQ

Van Doren Waxter

1 Davies St, London W1K 3DB 62 Kingly St, London W1B 5QN +44 20 7493 8611 [email protected] sadiecoles.com Paul Anthony Harford at Davies Street September 13-November 10 Michele Abeles: “world cup” at Kingly Street November 1December 19

195 Chrystie St, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 982 1930 [email protected] vandorenwaxter.com Harvey Quaytman, October 4November 3 Gareth Nyandoro, November 8December 21

Victoria Miro Gallery

Michael Werner

Pace/MacGill Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery

4 E 77th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 988 1623 [email protected] michaelwerner.com Enrico David: Sculptures, Tapestries and Works on Paper, September 8November 24

32 E 57th St, 9th floor, New York, NY 10022 +1 212 759 7999 [email protected] pacemacgill.com Yoshitomo Nara, October 25January 12

304, 3/F Pedder Building 12 Pedder St, Central Hong Kong +86 852 2801 6252 [email protected] simonleegallery.com Toby Ziegler: “Your Mother,” new paintings, October 31-January 4

Peter Blum Gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash 534 W 26th St, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 744 7400 [email protected] miandn.com Daniel Lefcourt: “Terraform,” November 1-December 22

176 Grand St, New York, NY 10013 +1 212 244 6055 [email protected] peterblumgallery.com Esther Kläs: “Second Future,” November 16-January 12

Paula Cooper Gallery Mnuchin Gallery 45 E 78th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 861 0020 [email protected] mnuchingallery.com “The Joy of Color,” Nov ember 1December 15

521 W 21st St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 255 1105 [email protected] paulacoopergallery.com Sol LeWitt: “Gouaches,” November 3December 15

Regen Projects Monika Kiviniemi [email protected] kiviniemi.se

PACE 6 Burlington Gardens London W1S 3ET +44 20 3206 7600 [email protected] pacegallery.com Adam Pendleton: “Our Ideas,” October 2-November 9 Brent Wadden: “sympathetic resonance,” November 22-January 11

6750 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90038 +1 310 276 5424 offi[email protected] regenprojects.com Tavares Strachan: “Invisibles,” November 2-December 22

Richard Nagy Ltd 22 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4PY +44 20 7262 6400 [email protected] richardnagy.com

Sperone Westwater 257 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 999 7337 [email protected] speronewestwater.com Peter Halley: “Unseen Paintings 1997-2002, From the Collection of Gian Enzo Sperone,” November 2December 22

Sprüth Magers Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Berlin +49 30 28 88 40 30 [email protected] spruethmagers.com Gary Hume, Robert Irwin, Mika Rottenberg, through November 10 John Bock and Thomas Demand, November 24-January

Van de Weghe Fine Art 1018 Madison Avenue, 3rd flr, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 744 1900 [email protected] vdwny.com Modern, post-war and contemporary European and American artists

Gallery I and II: 16 Wharf Rd, N1 7RW London Mayfair: 14 St. George St, W1S 1FE London +44 20 7336 8109 victoria-miro.com Yayoi Kusama: “The Moving Moment When I Went to the Universe” at Wharf Road, October 3December 21 Ilse D’Hollander at Mayfair November 7-December 21

Washburn Gallery 177 Tenth Ave, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 397 6780 [email protected] washburngallery.com Ilya Bolotowsky: “Paintings from 1935-1980,” November 2December 22

White Cube 144-152 Bermondsey St, SE1 3TQ London 25-26 Mason’s Yard, SW1Y 6BU London +44 207 930 5373 [email protected] whitecube.com Julie Mehretu at Mason’s Yard, September 21-November 3 Leon Wuidar at Mason’s Yard, November 9-January 12 Doris Salcedo, at Bermondsey, September 28-November 12 Darren Almond at Bermondsey, November 28-January 20 Christine Ay Tjoe at Bermondsey, November 28-January 20

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AUCTIONS

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PIERRE SOULAGES (B. 1919) Peinture 130 x 97 cm, 27 août 1963 oil on canvas 130 x 97 cm. (51⅛ x 38¼ in.) €1,000,000 - 1,500,000